As of 5 April 2026, China’s People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) has issued an unusually long1 Notice to Air Mission (NOTAM)2 restricting air travel over the Yellow Sea and East China Sea for the next forty days. This notice represents a significant escalation in China airspace restrictions, which generally last for no more than three days3. No military exercises have been declared for the NOTAM period, but major military exercises are likely to occur in the restricted zone.

Military exercises in this restricted zone would very likely include intelligence-collection regarding Japanese capabilities; China’s January 2026 blockade drills near Taiwan included drone reconnaissance over Taipei.4 The restricted areas are located near the western coast of Japan5, where Liberal Democratic Party hardliner Sanae Takaichi has recently taken a firm anti-China stance6. In October 2025 Takaichi said Japan would defend Taiwan militarily in case of a Chinese invasion7. Under her tenure, the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) has developed and fielded its first long-range hypersonic missile8, the Type 25. On 1 April 2026, the JSDF announced the deployment of the Type 259 at a base on the East China Sea. Chinese state media slammed the weapon10 as a violation of the non-aggression clause of Japan’s post-WWII constitution.

Military exercises in the restricted zone also likely aim to intimidate Taiwanese political and military leadership. The Taiwanese opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT) is scheduled to visit China next week, and the party chair will likely meet with president of China Xi Jinping11. This would represent a major acceleration in the diplomatic process between China and Taiwan.

A continuous multi-week military exercise cannot be ruled out; Chinese military exercises have radically increased in size since 2022, and show no signs of stopping. A fresh round of drills would raise tensions in East Asia as Xi Jinping continues to express his intent to “re-unify” China and Taiwan by 2027.

As of 30 March 2026, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) continues to assist the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps by sharing geospatial intelligence, empowering IRGC detachments to strike American assets with FPV drones, loitering munitions, and ballistic missiles.1 This support substantially improves the accuracy of IRGC strikes2 allowing them to target American intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities.3

On 27 March 2026, Iran struck Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia with a barrage of drones and satellite-guided ballistic missiles.4 The strike targeted and destroyed an E-3 Sentry (AWACS) surveillance plane, an early warning ‘sensing’ aircraft used for signals intelligence (SIGINT) gathering, target detection and tracking, and command-and-control battle management, with a per-unit cost over 300 million dollars.5 The missile precisely struck the body of the aircraft, destroying the airframe. (Photographs show damage incompatible with a strike by a small drone.)6 This is the first time an E-3 Sentry has been destroyed in combat.7 Twelve American soldiers were wounded in the attack.8

The IRGC alone does not possess satellite capabilities sufficient to carry out this strike.9 Iran’s Tolou-3 satellite series can only conduct low Earth orbit (LEO) operations10, and can only photograph real-time imagery at an accuracy of thirty to sixty feet (five to ten meters)11, meaning Russian capabilities were likely used to identify and target American aircraft.12 The Russian Aerospace Defense Forces’ (VKS) GLObal NAvigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema (GLONASS) satellite constellation is likely responsible for identifying the E-3 Sentry13, while the SVR is likely responsible for delivering the coordinates to the IRGC. Russia is likely sharing this intelligence in order to 1) degrade American capabilities in the region and 2) perpetuate the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz to Western allies while 3) guaranteeing safe passage for Russian vessels. This relationship is diagrammed below.

Continued intelligence sharing, particularly targeting American ISR capabilities, is likely to increase American losses and may substantially reduce American intelligence-gathering capabilities. ISR capabilities are the foundation of the war; with reduced ISR capabilities, it may become prohibitively expensive or impossible to continue strikes on Iranian leadership, provide early warning of missile and drone attacks against Israel and the Arab Gulf states, or enforce future treaties, ceasefires, or nuclear agreements.

“The flying road turns into smoke,” Gogol writes, “...for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall… force all nations to give you way.”

One hears echoes of Gogol’s troika in Vladimir Putin’s brutal demonstrations of the Oreshnik, a next-generation hypersonic weapon. The Oreshnik rocket (Орешник: hazel shrub, for the tree of smoke produced by launch) is renowned for its speed and agility, which supposedly allows it to surpass and outmaneuver even the most advanced air defense systems. Like the troika, it represents a nation out of control, obsessed with revanchist notions of lost empire. But it is perhaps most powerful as a psychological weapon.

Each time Russia deploys it against Ukrainian infrastructure, it represents a powerful threat to Western powers, as we have so far failed to intercept or shoot down the Oreshnik. It travels at Mach 10: 8,000 miles per hour, ten times the speed of sound. In the later stages of a strike, when air defense would usually be critical, this weapon is simply too fast to defend against. Unlike the more expensive and risky hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) prototypes, the Oreshnik achieves hypersonic speeds through rapid ballistic descent, not sustained atmospheric glide. It maneuvers as it travels; it can make microscopic adjustments in-flight. It can potentially carry up to thirty-six nuclear munitions, allowing Russia to render wide swaths of battlefield uninhabitable for decades or empowering decapitation strikes against a state’s entire command structure. For the first time since the introduction of the Patriot system, Russia can hit us where they want, when they want.

At least, that’s what they want us to think. This is the maximal intimidation narrative. The Oreshnik’s existence is atomic blackmail; it implies a coming nuclear war. Its use is simple power posturing. In this regard it is not unlike the Soviet Union’s record-setting 50-megaton Tsar Bomba test, conducted in 1961.

The Shot(s) Heard ‘Round the World

The Oreshnik has been deployed twice in the past fourteen months. It was first launched in November of 2024, against Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city. The Oreshnik was launched from a base in Southwestern Russia; it quickly climbed past the sky and slipped into the upper atmosphere. The extreme thinness of the atmosphere reduced the air resistance on the rocket, and it shot silently over the horizon, invisible to Ukraine’s web of American-made air defense systems. Then its direction changed: it began to fly downwards. The increasing force of gravity compounded its speed. Just minutes after launch and mere seconds to impact, it reached speeds more than seven times the speed of sound. As the rocket entered the lower atmosphere, its nose broke away, revealing six MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles). The munitions dropped from the body of the rocket and activated their own propulsion systems, followed milliseconds later by brilliant, electric-white flashes. On the ground, it would have looked like a massive, spontaneous electric storm as the munitions screamed down and evaporated their targets, one after another after another. The strike reduced a massive Soviet-era aerospace depot to rubble.

According to senior Ukrainian officials, the munitions used in the strike were non-explosive, non-nuclear ‘dummies.’ The destructive power of the strike was derived simply from the monumental speed at which the missile travels. The six vehicles, however, are designed to carry six nuclear warheads each. If the Oreshnik had been armed, Dnipro’s 968,502 citizens would have had a few seconds’ warning before being struck by thirty-six nuclear bombs.

The second strike was eleven days ago, on the city of Lviv, the fifth-largest in Ukraine. It began with a massive barrage of Iranian-made Shahed drones, which struck electrical transformers, power stations, coal-fired power plants, and pipelines. Then the Oreshnik entered the lower atmosphere at Mach 11. Its reentry vehicles arced white across the night sky before striking an “undisclosed facility.” One potential target is the Bilche-Volytsko-Uherske Underground Gas Storage Facility, the largest of its kind in all of Europe.

Minutes before the 2024 strike, Russia notified the United States through nuclear risk reduction channels, but no such notification was provided in the 2026 strike. But perhaps that’s by design. The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies writes:

“In a war with NATO, Russia could employ [Oreshniks] for prompt deep strikes on high-value area targets such as aircraft parked at air bases. However, using such an expensive missile for a routine attack on Ukrainian infrastructure, when Russia has cheaper and more abundant munitions better suited for that purpose, makes far less military sense… the Russians likely intended more for a psychological rather than military effect.”

The strike killed a family of four. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were left without power, which rapid response teams are still working to restore. Putin’s hypersonic saber-rattling is not just a threat to the West, but a campaign of total war designed to break the resolve of Ukrainians, who show no signs of giving up.

Beyond Deterrence: The Forensic Evidence

In Gogol’s description of the troika, he alludes to the psychological effect on those who witness this speeding bullet of history:

“…the spectators, struck with portent, halting to wonder you be not a thunderbolt launched from heaven? What does that awe-inspiring progress of yours foretell? What is the unknown force which lies within your mysterious steads?”

But this is just what Putin wants from us. We must move past fear, past dumbfoundedness, past outrage at yet another violation of the taboo against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and instead analyze the evidence left behind by the first field-tests of this weapon.

Exhibits I & II: Entry Vehicles Separate

The two videos1 below were recorded by CCTV cameras just south of Lviv on the 8th of January, 2026.

Open on houses and parked cars; the fence and snow-covered hood visible in the bottom-center of exhibit I is visible in the bottom-left of exhibit II. In both cases, there is first a brilliant orange flash in the sky, visible in the top-right corner. This first flash is most likely the incredible heat of the nose separating from the hypersonic rocket, disgorging the six MIRVs. The six light objects, which resemble ridged cylindrical flashes, are the afterimage of these vehicles falling to earth. They fire in succession, almost like a six-shooter revolver.

This lag-time may provide a small window of opportunity for extremely advanced air defense systems like the American THAAD. Much more promising is the potential for a drone-based response, though such a defense system would require a web of drones in the air for the entire duration of a potential strike.

Exhibit III: Impact

The footage2 below was taken from an undisclosed camera, some miles from the other videos. This camera was much, much closer to the strike, providing a clearer view of the reentry vehicles as they strike their targets.

Open on a view of the sky with trees in the lower third of the frame. This appears to be a more rural area, outside Lviv proper. First is the luminous flash visible in the other videos. This is high-speed lower-atmospheric entry; the MIRVs are breaking away. Then, at about 0.9 seconds, a bright, luminous streak descends diagonally. This is the first of the MIRVs. Near the end of the second 1, there is a single frame of separated dummy warheads, also known as flechettes. If the Oreshnik was nuclear-armed, these would be the warheads. They strike the ground just over the horizon of the video. At around 3 seconds the camera begins to shake, and by 10 seconds the attack is mostly over, though residual flashes continue. It’s possible that these flashes represent ground explosions, ammunition cook-offs, or large-scale oil and natural gas combustion. Between the late 2024 strike and the early 2026 strike, one thing remains clear: that energy targets have been prioritized. But why?

Why Now?

We’ve developed three hypotheses that may explain why the Oreshnik was deployed at these particular times. As a primer, consider the two attacks in the context of the aggregate strikes on Ukraine.

Hypothesis I: Drawdown Prevention

It’s possible that Oreshnik launches are ordered by generals during concerns about potential Russian military drawdowns.

Late 2024 was particularly punishing for Russian forces, with Ukraine accessing new weapons systems. Taiwan transferred its stock of retired Hawk missiles to Kyiv. Ukraine fired the British-made Storm Shadow for the first time. Biden authorized an ATACMS strike inside Russia for the first time. And, perhaps most relevantly, Trump was elected on November 5th. His (ultimately hollow) promises to promptly end the war in Ukraine may have made Russian military leaders more interested in assertiveness and power-posturing.

However, this hypothesis is less effective when applied to the early 2026 strike. Apart from the possibility of internal strife, the Russian military appears far from a drawdown. Rather, if nothing changes, they’re poised to gain substantial territory in the coming weeks. Zelenskyy warned today that Russia is preparing to mount a major attack, beginning with the destruction of power grids.

Hypothesis II: Winter War

It’s also possible that Oreshnik launches are ordered by generals directly before major weather events. Freezing cold temperatures (which can prove disruptive to Eastern European cities even in the best of times) become much more dangerous with broken power grids. If the Ukrainian state is left shivering in the dark, this theory holds, defeating them becomes much simpler. Therefore, Russia strikes them in late 2024, as that year’s winter deepens, and again in early 2026, just as this year’s winter hits its zenith.

The problem with this hypothesis is that this winter war is not particularly effective. Power crews work tirelessly to restore the grid; they are 58,000 in number and their ranks are only growing. The Institute for the Study of War reports that Russia’s attacks on the grid may begin to target nuclear power plants; this is a clear sign of desperation, a last-ditch attempt to supplant a failing strategy. But most of all, the bombardment of energy facilities has not weakened the resolve of everyday Ukrainians. Rather, it has galvanized the country, uniting them against Russian aggression and inspiring them to stay the course until peace is won.

Hypothesis III: Tsar Putin

Finally, it’s possible that the Oreshnik launches are militarily incoherent, and ordered by Putin, motivated by his whims. This hypothesis considers the 2024 strike a message by Putin to Trump as a demonstration of Russian power before he takes office. The 2026 strike, then, must be Putin’s response to the ‘drone attack’ on his Novgorod dacha. However, American analysts (and Trump) do not believe that any such attack occurred.

Ultimately, neither statistics nor weather nor personalism can provide a compelling explanation of the Oreshnik’s use. It may not be possible to determine when the next strike will come, but perhaps we can identify where it will come from.

Dead Souls (I): The Belarusian Threat

On December 30, the Russian and Belarusian defense ministries announced that a Russian Strategic Missile Forces battalion equipped with Oreshniks had begun combat duty in Belarus, apparently at a site near the Russian border. The footage they released, however, showed only auxiliary vehicles, not the launchers, and the site is apparently not yet complete. This narrows down the work significantly: a few candidate sites in Belarus would be enough to develop a rough idea of where the Oreshnik might be stationed. With a site in mind, we can begin to calculate what threat it truly poses to NATO and Western Europe.

I’ve identified four sites that fit this definition: the 465th Missile Brigade in Asipovichy, the Krichev-6 Aerodrome in Krychaw, a Soviet-era strategic missile base in Paulauka, and the Zyabrovka Airfield in Zyabrovka.

Site I: Krichev-6

History repeats itself at Krichev-6 in Eastern Belarus, closer to the country’s Russian border than its Ukrainian one. Boris Yeltsin asked that this site be destroyed, according to Military Watch Magazine, as it was a relic of Moscow’s nuclear program in Belarusian territory. This winter, Middlebury College argued that this site had been revived to host the Oreshnik.

This is short of perfectly compelling, though. Their own article notes that Belarus’s Aleksandr Lukashenko said the Oreshnik was not deployed at Krichev-6, but “somewhere more advantageous, but I will not speak about that.”

This leaves us to consider the definition of “advantageous,” and forces us to explore sites further South than Krichev-6, sites closer to Kyiv and Lviv.

Sites II & III: Paulauka and Zyabrovka

These next candidate sites are twins. They both clear the bar for “advantageousness,” but also carry trade-offs and irregularities. When compared to Krichev-6, Paulauka and Zyabrovka are about 50% and 75% closer to Kyiv respectively. Exhibit 1 is the airfield at Zyabrovka; Exhibit 2 is the new construction at Paulauka.

However, I’ve determined that the viability of each site is substantially complicated by geography and development.

The airfield at Zyabrovka (Exhibit 1) is in disuse and disarray. There’s no publicly accessible evidence of contemporaneous military presence. The area around the tarmac has been denuded; little to no tree cover remains. This erases any chance of hiding the Oreshnik or its launch equipment. All told, as launch sites go, it’s possible, albeit improbable.

The construction site at Paulauka (Exhibit 2) is a different story. Ample tree cover exists to hide the weapons system, but the roads are light earth, inconsistently paved, with sharp turns and little concrete foundation. Furthermore, the square-shaped plots lack a connecting tarmac, meaning that the site lacks air accessibility. Even if construction has rapidly progressed since these satellite images were taken, this is another potential but improbable site.

There is, however, a fourth candidate.

Site IV: Asipovichy

Out past Minsk, the territory starts to militarize. The road grade flattens and the highways widen; they’re made to accommodate tanks, supply trucks, and heavy weapons, traveling cross-country to small outposts and supply stations. Asipovichy, the site of the Belarusian 465th Missile Brigade, is one such outpost.

Ukrainska Pravda writes that Radio Liberty satellite analysts identified major construction at Asipovichy. The construction shows clear signs of both military activity and reinforcements consistent with missile infrastructure.

This is Asipovichy. It consists of a long concrete runway with multiple taxiways, nestled in a forested area just Southeast of Minsk. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2022, it has been regarded as a rear-area base: a hub for the transit of food, materiel, and the injured and dead. Today, it is being transformed by a twenty-million dollar renovation. Note the three areas of interest below:

These are wide-body helicopters. The five-rotor pattern and two-finned tails distinguish them as Mi-8s or Mi-17s. The small oil stains visible on the tarmac clearly indicate regular use: these are utility helicopters, shuttling people and supplies to and from the airfield. But with no major force buildup at the base and no other vehicles visible, what purpose do these utility helicopters serve? The answer is simple: construction.

This is a support compound for a group of aircraft or a complex weapons system, but it’s not finished. What you are seeing is a grid of narrow roads with multiple small ‘cutouts’ tucked into natural tree cover. These are hardstands, designed to protect and hide trucks, fuel tanks, or air defense batteries. Think of them as open-air garages for important resources. The scarred, light-brown earth in the bottom-center of this photo betrays the site’s incompleteness, along with the lack of cover in the bottom right corner. If one reads this image like a clock, starting at ‘midnight,’ the ‘hours’ from one o’clock to three o’clock are barren; construction intensifies at four. By eleven o’clock, we find completed hardstands, possibly protecting Ural-4320 supply trucks.

If this site is indeed being retrofitted for the Oreshnik, these hardstands are built to hide and protect the transporter erector launcher (TEL) vehicle, the missile itself, and the targeting systems which guide it on its flight. Such a missile cannot be launched from a hardstand, however. This is where the next image comes in.

The center of the construction activity at Asipovichy is here, just off the main tarmac. The ground has been utterly leveled, revealing light-colored earth on both sides of the road. But there are also areas with mixed tones and irregular churn. This is not neatly graded, one-time construction. Rather, we’re seeing frequent and continuing traffic by construction vehicles. The roads are telling too: it’s wider than most of the roads on the airbase and its corners are longer and gentler. This provides long, heavy TEL vehicles the space they need to turn, maneuver, and navigate.

Most critically, there’s a rectangular structure with two large earthwork berms at the center of the construction site. This kind of enclosure is anomalous. It doesn’t match the other hardstands and is not consistent with helicopter storage units. It’s too widely-spaced to be weather protection, with two wide openings at either end. This is a site for a high-value vehicle like a TEL, and the small concrete rectangles scattered around the site are well-suited for communications equipment, generators, or fuel tanks.

I am moderately confident that this earthwork berm is designed for missile launches, and, if finished, would allow for the deployment of the Oreshnik hypersonic missile.

Dead Souls (II): Back-of-the-Envelope

If the Oreshnik is about to be secreted away south of Minsk, if this site really is being designed to accommodate it, does this spell disaster for European security? Does this foretell a return to fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills? Is EU support to Ukraine, and indeed the entire NATO deterrence system, about to evaporate?

In answering that question, we must flip the metaphorical envelope over and engage in some back-of-the-envelope math.

First, a key principle: while hypersonic velocity represents a brave new world in defense, it does not repeal physics. The same laws which govern conventional missiles also apply here.

Even at extreme speeds, this missile’s real combat range is its theoretical flight distance reduced by five key factors:

1. The mass of the payload (the heavier the payload, the more velocity is reduced),

2. The optimal combat trajectory (in this case, a depressed trajectory designed to complicate interception),

3. The energy spent deploying, directing, and maneuvering the reentry vehicles (which grows with the number of reentry vehicles),

4. The accuracy constraint imposed by the Circular Error Probable (CEP) metric,

5. And the ‘margin of error’ which all launch plans include.

​Russian media reports claim the Oreshnik has enough fuel to strike at targets 3,000 to 3,300 miles away from its launch site. But as the above math demonstrates, this is a best-case scenario, far from reality. Three thousand miles is an idealized flight distance assuming optimal trajectory, perfect deployment, full payload survival, and loose requirements for accuracy or reliability. An intercontinental strike imposes all of those constraints harshly and simultaneously. Furthermore, at terminal velocities on the order of Mach 11, even the tiniest structural or thermal margins matter. Quite simply, to argue that the Oreshnik could circumnavigate half of the globe and then penetrate American air defenses is fearmongering. To allow fear of the Oreshnik to influence our policymaking or weaken our support of Ukraine is absurdity.

But what targets would we be remiss not to consider?

If Russia seeks to strike a barely-defended suburb or an open field, the Oreshnik is less sensitive to accuracy and dispersion. These are extremely wide targets: submunitions that land tens or even hundreds of meters apart may still produce militarily meaningful effects. These targets are usually not covered by air defense systems, or the systems are otherwise occupied with drones or taken offline by electronic warfare. Even then, the effective range is far from Russia’s 3,000 mile threat.

For targets like these, experts argue for an effective range of between 1,100 and 1,860 miles.

At this stage of the war, though, few targets fit this definition. Ukrainian air defense shows no signs of giving up, and their counter-drone capabilities grow with each passing day.

For defended point targets, like cities or military installations with strong air defense networks, the range reductions only grow. Unguided dispersion, reentry attrition, and conservative planning assumptions all compound.

For targets like these, argue for an effective range of between 620 and 990 miles. Suddenly, the hypersonic troika of Russian empire is revealed as an exaggeration. Far from a war-ending weapon or a revolution in military affairs, the Oreshnik is, at heart, a mildly more effective ICBM.

Dead Souls (III): The Shadow Over (Central) Europe

This all begs the question: if not London or Paris, if not Washington D.C. or New York, who is truly living in the shadow of the Oreshnik? The answer is simple: Central Europe.

Of mild concern is an Oreshnik strike on a major Central European or Baltic city. Berlin and Warsaw are both well within range, as are Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. But with NATO’s Article V collective security pact in effect, the chances of such a strike are slim to none.

Of higher concern is an Oreshnik strike on a major military installation in Central Europe. NATO Allied Air Command at Ramstein Air Base and the USAF 31st Fighter Wing at Aviano Air Base both fall within this range assessment. Even with American air defenses fully functioning, a few submunitions could slip through. Even two or three would be enough to do substantial damage against our rapid-response aircraft, or kill the decision-makers who lead NATO’s air capabilities. But, again, as long as Article V remains in effect, the risks are low.

Of gravest concern are Ukrainian cities, factories, and power infrastructure. The Oreshnik will be most effective here, particularly if coupled with drone swarms to occupy air defense. Our media outlets have written and spoken about this weapon as if it were a threat to Americans, with range stretching from Alaska to Boston and beyond; all the while, defense contractors have overpromised and underdelivered on American hypersonics. But for Ukrainians, the Oreshnik is not a media event, and it is not an opportunity to win a contract. It is, like the war at large, a terrible scourge on their lives. And until we have a stronger understanding of this weapon and how it works, there’s little we can do to keep them safe.

The (Non-)Triumph of the Troika

Both Ukraine and Russia claim Nikolai Gogol; his legacy is contested. The war has transformed that contest, and made it absurd. But his question to the speeding troika remains.

“Where, then, are you speeding, O Russia… whither? Answer me!”

Where is Russia going? What will become of it when this war is over? And what of its war economy, its burgeoning stockpile of hypersonic weapons?

“But there is never any answer — there is only the terrible sound of your bells.”

Yes, Mister Gogol, with that I would have to agree.

No modern weapon lives as many secret lives as the Shahed 136 drone, produced by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The Shaheds are colloquially known as ‘suicide drones,’ partially because their name means “martyr” in Persian. These drones are launched from mobile truck-mounted racks, travel long distances, loiter over their target, and then impact them warhead-first. They’re designed in Iranian polytechnic universities, tested by Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, shipped through Central Asia, copied and mass-produced in Russia, and launched against Ukraine.

They also think. The Shaheds have an AI pilot that uses machine learning to identify the most lethal or valuable target, and then destroy it. They identify these targets with high-powered omnidirectional cameras. These AI-piloted models include top-of-the-line, American-made Nvidia chips. Target recognition is constantly being processed, as per the screencap below, taken from footage recovered from the memory card of a downed Shahed. (The footage appears to depict a highway outside a facility in China, the origin of the camera.) This means that target prioritization, when it happens, is instant. They are nothing less than a thinking bomb, and they learn through the experiences of their peers. That’s why Shahed testing by Iran-backed militias is so important: each deployment adds to the AI pilot’s shared database of recognized targets. Every Shahed launched by Shia militias outside Aleppo or Houthis in Sa’ana improves the lethality of the Shaheds raining down on Kyiv.

In this regard, all the secret lives of these ‘martyrs’ are interlinked. If nothing is done to interrupt this kill chain, autonomous Shaheds will enter a positive feedback loop of machine learning. They will become smarter faster than we can possibly respond. Defending against them would be next to impossible.

In this brief, I use an all-source approach, including geospatial imaging, social-media scraping, on-the-ground sources, and open-source shipping records, to track each stage in the lifecycle of a Shahed drone. Whenever possible, I have summarized or simplified matters that relate to the IRGC’s Quds Force, in anticipation of a future tracking project on the militias they back.

Design

All Shahed models begin their lives as ideas. They are dreamed up from first principles and adapted to lethal force. I used open-source documentation, including academic records in Farsi, to track how the IRGC turns innovation into prototypes: new designs, additions, and modifications.

The IRGC’s own Imam Hossein University is the locus of new Shahed development. It produces scholarly journals in Farsi, like the Journal of Aerospace Mechanics and the Electronic and Cyber Defense Journal. These journals publish work by professors and master’s degree students, from physics to mechanical engineering. Many of these innovations are produced by Iranian officer schools, including Iranian Army’s Imam Ali Officer University, and the Iranian Air Force’s Shahid Sattari University of Aeronautical Sciences and Technology. The ever-expanding corpus of “Shahid Literature” also includes strategic writings and use cases, which assists targeting officials in the Iranian military, and in the militaries Shaheds are sold to.

This chain of innovation provides the IRGC’s Shahed Aviation Industries Research Center with new models, which they lease to a Russian joint-stock company. The new models are then mass-produced in Russian territory. The diagram above was composed using open-source information, including sanction-enforcement records and academic records. It depicts the innovation ecosystem for Iranian drones, and the leasing agreement which mass-produces them.

Imam Hossein is also the site of initial physical testing. It’s host to the Ghadir Aerodynamics Center, which Iranian state documents identify as one of the largest and most powerful wind tunnels in the country. It has a rare combination of subsonic, transonic, and supersonic capabilities, and is a natural testing ground for new Shaheds.

Furthermore, Imam Hossein is host to a small airfield, identified by some Persian-language maps as the IRGC’s flight school. I used geospatial imagery to look at this airfield in detail, and found distinctive debris patterns near a cluster of buildings on the edge of the property.

There’s a row of light industrial buildings with pale roofs, most likely warehouses or workshops. Scattered nearby are triangular chunks from white airframes, between four and five meters wide. That’s about the same width as a Shahed. I am highly confident that some initial Shahed testing takes place at Imam Hossein university, either in the wind tunnel or on this airfield, or in both places.

But flight testing is not the end. Before being rolled out to the Russian market, new Shahed models will earn their stripes on the battlefields of the Middle East.

Field Testing

The IRGC field-tests Shahed drones by providing them to Iran-backed militias, many of whom are armed and advised by the extremely secretive and lethal Quds Force. These Iran-backed forces include Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen.

New Shahed models travel across their home country, from Tehran or Isfahan to an illegal or semi-legal border crossing. They may be labeled as tractor parts or machine tools. Telegram channels representing Iraqi militias claimed that some transfers take place overland near Sulaymaniyah. This smuggling is empowered and carried out by Iranian conglomerates, which illegally buy oil for the Iranian regime, shield the true nature of their smuggling activities, and fund the Iraqi militias mentioned above.

They move west across Highway 7, and soon they have reached the al-Qaim or Albu Kamal border crossing, or the illegal ‘Sikak’ military crossing. They come to rest at Deir ez-Zur, the largest city in southern Syria. Local Syrian journalists reported that Deir ez-Zur has been excavated by Iranian forces, with tunnels scattered across the city. Many Syrian social media accounts claim that Iran-backed militias store weapons, including drones, in these tunnels.

Also of note are various makeshift depots in Al Salhiyyah, a suburb of Deir ez-Zur across the Euphrates. Al Salhiyyah, home to the Quds Force’s notorious ‘Iranian Square’ depot, is also the site of the geospatial image included below. Although the sharpness of the image is less than ideal, the footage was taken very recently: just four days ago. I am somewhat confident that these are launch rails for drones, surrounded by scattered missile defense and radar equipment. The damaged perimeter walls may be the result of recent fighting between Iran-backed militias and the American-backed Syrian Defense Forces, which has a large contingent of Kurdish fighters.

Indeed, this evening, the SDF “carried out a raid campaign in the town of Al-Tayyana in the eastern Deir Ezzor countryside,” confiscating weapons systems which may have been provided by Iran. The Deir ez-Zur area was also the site of recent air-to-air warfare involving Shaheds. During Israeli strikes on the territory, a Shahed was destroyed by an air-to-air missile. Photographs of the exchange are attached below. From left to right, top to bottom: the drone flies due East, the Israeli jet follows, the jet launches an air-to-air missile, and the jet passes by the wreckage of the drone.

Though this exchange was a win for the Israeli jet, it may well contribute to long-term losses: the Shahed database now has data on air-to-air rockets. The AI pilots leading the next wave of Shaheds will access this information and account for it in their targeting. The IRGC’s aim, adding discrete bits of data to the larger system, has been fully achieved. Simply put, the drones are smarter now. The hardware itself was a martyr for that cause.

Shipment

Russian procurement officers do not often buy new products sight-unseen. Once a new Shahed model is developed, and new hardware is innovated and tested, the IRGC must transport it to Russia. The model will undergo further testing, including battlefield tests, and if it performs well it may enter mass-production under the existing lease.

I used open-source, publicly available shipping data to identify a likely shipment of Iranian drones or drone parts across the Caspian Sea. The Port Olya-2 is a Russian-flagged cargo ship. It left a port not far from Tehran about four days ago, and docked about six hours ago in Astrakhan, Russia, where it unloaded its containers.

The Port Olya-2 is owned by MG-Flot LLC, a company which is associated with Astrakhan businessman Jamaldin Emirmagomedovich Pashayev. Pashayev has been sanctioned by the United States for his material support to the Russian government, including illegal weapons shipments.

I am highly confident that unmanned aerial vehicles or the parts needed to assemble them were among its cargo. In coming months, it may face the same fate as the Port Olya-4, which was sunk by Ukrainian drone strikes. It was their first operation in the Caspian theater, and it may not be their last.

Mass-Production

If the Port Olya-2 was to continue up the Volga River, it would eventually reach Tartarstan. In this enclave, in a special economic zone, lies the beating heart of the Russian war economy. It is where the Shaheds are mass-produced.

Reuters reviewed video footage of the factories in Alabuga, owned by the joint stock company identified in the diagram I created above. The factory, located in Russia’s Tatarstan region, “invited school pupils to study at a college… once they had completed ninth grade (aged 14-15), so that they could study drone manufacturing… and then work at the factory when they [finish] college.” Indeed, Russian state administrators do not believe that the Shahed economy is going away. Rather, it’s just getting started, and entire classes of children are being reared to one day join that economy as manufacturers.

This is where it happens: Shahed mass-production. Note the six helipads, which imply frequent visits to the site, probably by military helicopter. Also of interest are the rail and road access, with wide roundabouts for shipping via semi truck. But in the end, it matters less how Shaheds cross Russia. What matters more is where they’re going.

Use

The mass-produced Shaheds are now well-traveled. Their progenitors have criss-crossed the world, from innovations in Iran to stress-tests in Syria, and shipping in Central Asia. They come to rest in occupied Crimea, at Russian launch sites.

One such site, in Cape Fiolent, on the southern tip of Crimea, was carefully prepared to protect Shaheds before they’re launched. The geospatial image below shows the same Russian military installation in Cape Fiolent, in 2021 and 2025.

I am highly confident that this is a drone-control installation. The recently added satellite dishes are designed for in-air control and communication. There are visible cable trenches and conduits, along with a row of containers, likely for signal processing and data storage. It’s wrapped in a perimeter fence, and there are raised plinths at the edges, which is consistent with the presence of generators or possibly radiofrequency shelters. In short: this is the uplink for Shaheds.

I am fairly confident that these are the trucks carrying the Shaheds. They’re parked only a few miles from the uplink site, in this clearing. These are Ural-4320s or Ural-375Ds, both of which can carry launch racks for Shaheds. The trailers attached to the backs of some of the trucks are most likely generators or batteries for the launch racks, to help propel the drones into the air. After that, the rocket ignites. Then the Shahed is off.

It may cast its shadow over the Black Sea, or over the front line in Donetsk. It may travel over the marshes near Odessa to strike a Ukrainian oil refinery, or it may plummet into a government building in Kyiv. It may kill no one, leaving a large and useless crater. Or it may scream down onto a civilian truck loaded with crates of fresh produce.

I spoke with a Ukrainian refugee about the Shaheds. She’d most recently been in the country in the early months of 2025.

“They are a part of normal life now,” she said of the drones. “They are loud, almost as loud as an airliner, and they buzz through the sky at all hours. No place is safe from them.”

In the images below, a Shahed approaches and strikes a civilian vehicle, obliterating it. The strike was just a few days ago, on October 18th.

Make no mistake: the Shahed is a weapon of total war, not tactical combat. It’s designed to hit power grid, industry, and state-institutional targets: to inflict maximum suffering on a population, and make them capitulate. But Ukraine has not quit.

As I’ve proven, these Shaheds, these martyrs, are rich with strange experiences, and live long and varied secret lives. They are the result of a carefully forged Eurasian kill chain. But their strength is also their weakness. If they can break one link in the chain beyond repair, whether in Tehran or the Caspian, the flow of drones will stop. Once Ukraine is fully armed to degrade and destroy Russio-Iranian power, the hard part won’t be getting it done. It’ll be choosing a place to start.

As of mid-September, Putin has accepted that the war will not be won over three days. It will not even be won over three years. Rather, this war is one of attrition. The path to a Russian victory is pure stamina: to chip away at Ukraine’s defenses and bombard their territory such that the state will seize up and eventually collapse from within. To this end, the Russian economy has been re-arranged to prolong this war from a three-day sprint into a long-distance marathon. It’s not a clash of pure strategy or innovative tactics, but a competition between two defense-industrial bases.

For their part, Ukraine has adapted to this new reality by bolstering air defense from the ground up. I was recently privileged to hear a conversation with Maj. Gen. Keith Phillips, recently the defense attaché of the U.S. office in Ukraine. “[It’s an] absolutely remarkable story,” Phillips said. “[They had] zero control of the airspace in 2022, essentially. And now, despite significant kinetic activity almost every single evening [and] records being broken overnight, they’re doing a pretty remarkable job.”

Inside and Outside the Crystal Palace

In persuading Russian citizens to acquiesce to this state of permanent war, the Russian state is offering distractions like the Summer in Moscow festival, which turned the capital into a carnival with “fourteen open-air theaters, one of them floating on water… opera, drama and even clowns riding unicycles.” The citizens of the crystal palace are receiving these entertainments in exchange for their continued participation in the new Russian war economy, in which drone and munitions output are the new goals.

As Putin attempts to convince the Russian people to accept their state’s authority, he also attempts to convince the Ukrainian people to reject theirs. While Putin attended the 2025 China Victory Day Parade, his military unleashed a major barrage against civilian areas in Ukraine. Demoralization and perceived isolation is the express goal. While Russia is ringed with friends, Putin argues, Ukraine stands alone under fire.

But this is not the case, as his own military strategy betrays. The massive drone incursion over Poland, Iranian-produced drones violating Romanian airspace, and the Russian fighter jets which spent twelve minutes in Estonian airspace represent a NATO-targeted adaptation of this attrition strategy. The increasing severity of these incidents, all of them within a week, forces us to conclude that NATO is being intimidated. Putin’s flagrant violations argue: “Russia wants this conflict, and can handle it.” NATO loses when it accepts this false narrative.

Most agree that NATO would trounce Russia in a head-to-head clash. The airspace violations are a way of testing the West’s appetite. If we only respond to this stress-test with statements of concern and consternation, and Article-IV consultation, we will essentially be handing Putin a writ of approval to continue his war-of-attrition strategy, unheeded. Action is required. However, it need not take the form of direct engagement with Russia. I use the rest of this brief to discuss the options that action could take.

Decisions, Decisions

This moment represents an opportunity to simultaneously bolster Ukraine’s defenses and test fresh tactics which would greatly strengthen NATO’s own posture.

Option One: Supply-by-Drone for a Shrunken Force

The first option is a massive increase in the strength and numbers of supply-delivering drones. This would solve a few key problems on the battlefield. Clayton Simms, a former Marine and volunteer on the front lines, notes that while the war has been in a stall, its scale has also shrunk. Units are now smaller, achieving the same or better results as large groups; most of these units are under constant siege from drones and fighting on two or three hours of sleep per night, or lower. As drone warfare becomes the new normal, the gear required to prosecute said war balloons: most of these exhausted soldiers are carrying between seventy-five and one hundred pounds of material at any given time. These units are on a fundamental level haggard and exhausted, but are effectively holding territory with a deep sense of resolve.

In the status quo, small groups, a handful of exhausted men each, are being inconsistently resupplied by deeply exposed convoys. It needn’t be this way. We should be running constant, small-scale drone-delivery of critical materials (shelf-stable food, cases of ammunition, and medical supplies). This would serve as a major force multiplier and reserve large vehicles for extracting units from the field whenever rotations become possible. The West, from Raytheon to Rheinmetall, should be mass-producing these supply drones, and they should include livestreaming and archival capabilities with integrated algorithmic review. Every time a drone is downed, the AI should review the footage and identify what went wrong. Eventually, they will become unbeatable. The best time to develop a human-in-the-loop machine learning system for flying drones was yesterday. The second-best time is today.

Option Two: A Directed Energy Solution for Enemy Drones

Likewise, the shape for counter-drone tactics could benefit from serious revisioning. Simms notes that Ukrainian soldiers now carry shotguns in addition to the rest of their arsenal, specifically to target and take down drones. It needn't be this way. America can (and should) eat the cost of the new counter drone lasers produced by Electro Optic Systems. They “can shoot down 20 drones a minute, at a cost of less than 10 cents per shot.”

All signs point to directed energy playing a critical role in Trump’s Golden Dome project. This is the perfect moment to test out a top contender in the industry. If E.O.S. works on the Ukrainian battlefield, we should add it to our arsenal. If it doesn’t work: lesson learned, back to the drawing board; then we will try again.

Option Three: Supporting Ukrainian Advances with Geospatial Imaging

There is a massive opportunity in the fields outside Kostiantynivka, a steelmaking and glass-blowing industrial city. Once, Kostiantynivka produced all the materials needed to build the skeleton of Chernyshevsky’s crystal palace. Today, the city is the logistical lung of Ukraine’s defense of the region around the Donbas. I have little doubt that Russia will attempt to encircle Kostiantynivka this autumn to break those supply lines. But here’s why this represents an opportunity: if NATO extends fresh material support to Ukraine before the encirclement attempt, and Russia overextends its forces (as I believe it will do), the Ukrainian military might be able to successfully breakout. This rupture, if it occurs, would likely send Russian forces fleeing back across the Donbas lines.

My initial geospatial imaging confirms the Ukrainian advantage here. The Russian encirclement will require substantial travel over flat, exposed fields. The Ukrainian breakout would run along the Kryvyi Torets’ River, largely shielding forces from drones (at least those without infrared capabilities). But I don’t think this is enough to stop the Russians from mounting the attack on Kostiantynivka. Far away, the man in the crystal palace demands that his will be done.

The Crashing

The crystal palace cannot last forever. Increasingly, there is no rear area in this war. Iranian suicide drones, loitering munitions, rockets, and long-range artillery have made the rear areas just as dangerous as the front line. There will be no more long supply convoys through the countryside. This is now a war fought centimeter by centimeter, by units that spend their days crawling through trenches and half-tunnels, under thermal blankets and camouflage sheets, sleeping when they can in dirt hutches, counting the meters through gritted teeth. War is hell, and this war has become particularly hellish. There is no softening this revelation. The best thing we can do now is redouble supply and deliver it by friendly drone, roll out directed energy weapons as a counter-drone solution, and align Ukrainian breakouts with geography over what will be a very difficult autumn.

And all the while, the crystal palace of the Russian war economy grows and ossifies. When it shatters, the damage will be tremendous. I am reminded, as I often am, of the opening to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. “Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall, soon. It will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.” NATO must outproduce and out-adapt Russia’s machine economy. The more we allow it to grow, the vaster the damage will be when it falls.

Today, eighty percent of Kazakh oil exports move through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, in which Russian state-owned companies own the largest share. The CPC moves oil overland from Kazakhstan through Southern Russia to the Black Sea, where it is then shipped to countries in the European Union. Increasingly, EU buyers are disturbed that their third-largest oil supplier has a supply chain which is inextricable from Russian interests. Furthermore, the pipeline infrastructure has come under attack from Ukrainian drones, temporarily reducing the pipeline’s capacity by up to forty percent.

This is the new reality: the risk of Russian involvement in Kazakh oil is becoming untenably high. The first Caspian Derby was a race to gain access to oilfields and shoulder out Russian influence; the second Caspian Derby will be a race to build pipelines that circumvent Russian territory. History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

The Shape for Things to Come

The shape for things to come is likely to utilize the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline, which moves oil from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Türkiye and the rest of the EU without ever touching Russia. Though Kazakhstan has made symbolic gestures of interest toward the BTC, the Caspian Sea separates them geographically from Azerbaijan and requires the use of tankers. If the West is to win the Second Caspian Derby, they will need to bridge the Caspian gap.

That’s where the proposed Trans-Caspian Pipeline comes in. The conditions and concerns that left it unbuilt have, in large part, ended. Turkmenistan’s interest has been revitalized by a gas realignment which favors Türkiye. Iran, which opposed the TCP by harassing research vessels in the Caspian, is weaker than ever in the wake of the Middle East crisis. And, perhaps most critically, Russia has not been so alienated from Western Europe since the Cold War. After decades of false starts, the table is finally set for the TCP to finally become a reality.

Players

The biggest winners here would be Azerbaijan and Türkiye, who would gain access to billions of additional barrels in throughput. Erdogan’s desire for close ties with Turkmenistan has led him to deport members of the Turkmen opposition back into the hands of Turkmenistan’s regime.

For their part, Turkmenistan would gain Western partners, allowing them a measure of independence from China, who is now their only gas buyer. Simultaneously, Turkmenistan’s international isolation is being eased by Oguljahan Atabayeva, a rising star who values Uzbek and Turkish collaboration. Whether or not Turkmenistan will open itself to diplomacy or will stay the course of isolationism is anyone’s guess.

The behavior of American interests in this Second Caspian Derby is likewise up for debate. While Chevron and Exxon are not likely to pull out of Kazakhstan entirely, their investment in the country has been declining since 2022. A new pipeline scheme that evades Russia might be exactly what they’re looking for. The TCP is more likely to be spearheaded by BP and France’s TotalEnergies, who both have a more direct interest in seeing it completed.

Then there’s China. As their demand for natural gas increases, their volume of imports from Kazakhstan is increasing too. Alternatively, China ties might satisfy Tokayev’s desire to diversify the country’s economy, for fear of overexploitation of resources. China’s behavior in the Second Caspian Derby will depend on the risk appetites of its Western competitors. The longer the TCP takes, the more China will do to court Kazakhstan and consolidate control.

As in the First Caspian Derby, Russia’s response may seem limited at first, but that should not be mistaken for acquiescence. Russia’s legal justifications for stopping the TCP have worn thin, and their influence over the other Caspian nations has been shattered by their post-2022 isolation. Their course of action will probably resemble their maneuvering after the First Caspian Derby: a slow creep of control through land purchases and large-scale investment by state-backed firms. But without the geographic bottleneck that defines the situation today, power and capital will no longer fall into their lap. Russia managed to play the First Caspian Derby in their favor, but they will not get so lucky again.

Did Anyone Remember to Ask Kazakhstan?

Finally, what does Kazakhstan want from the Second Caspian Derby? This is a question with two discrete answers. Tokayev and the rest of the Kazakh leadership want to preserve the balancing act of the present. The chances are slim. But the Kazakh people want something altogether different: they’ve recently petitioned the state for increased transparency and a shift toward nationalization. Though they might just stand to gain or lose the most in the Second Caspian Derby, it seems that no one is backing their horse in the derby, and no one is likely to.

The Origins of a Non-Nation

It’s difficult to say exactly when the Kurdish language emerged, since the earliest available Kurdish texts date to 1600 CE. We do, however, know this: it is an Indo-European language spoken by an ethnic group which stretches from Eastern Turkey, through Syria, Iraq, Armenia and Azerbaijan, to Western Iran. These lands constitute the transnational region called Kurdistan.

Around the time of those early Kurdish texts, Kurdish regions served as a buffer between the Ottoman and Safavid empires. This would not be its last time as a zone of separation between warring states. As the Ottomans centralized, their rule over the region transitioned from hands-off to increasingly interventionist. By 1900, Kurdish lands were almost entirely Ottoman-dominated: they were the unloyal subjects of a sickly empire on the brink of implosion.

The first World War brought Anatolia to its knees. The Young Turks, hoping to avoid a siege and occupation of Istanbul, struck a deal with Europe called the Treaty of Sèvres. The Sèvres allowed Atatürk and the Young Turks to continue their rule, albeit in a much smaller nation (the fledgling Turkey) and carved up the rest of the Ottoman territory among themselves. France claimed Lebanon and Syria; Britain claimed mandates over Cyprus, Palestine, and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). With the Ottomans deposed and new states rising to the power, the stage was set for the Kurdish nation to come to fruition.

The first attempt was Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji’s Kingdom of Kurdistan, which exercised power in northern British Mandate territory from 1921 to 1924. The King’s forces exercised their newfound control over Mesopotamia and put Kurdistan down by force. In the next attempt, Kurds bravely struck at Anatolia by digging into eastern Turkey and forming independent local authorities and militias. This three-year Republic of Ararat lasted from 1927 to 1930, when it was put down by the Turks. The final attempt at Kurdish sovereignty was a Soviet matter. In 1946, Stalin’s government funneled weapons and money to the Republic of Mahabad, a breakaway Kurdish city in northern Iran. Stalin mobilized the Kurds as a pawn against the increasingly pro-Western Shah (see my post “Four Hundred Seconds to Tel Aviv”); though small embers of revolutionary sentiment burned for thirty years, Kurdistan would not mobilize until 1978.

Providing Comfort and Subsidizing Revolution

Inspired by the propulsive growth of the Iranian revolution, a group of political science students at Turkey’s Ankara University founded the mercurial Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan. The PKK is an incredibly interesting case study in Middle Eastern militant groups: it has been alternately militant, Marxist, independentist, libertarian, liberal-democratic, and even ecological, but never Islamist. Their covert war against the Turkish government began with strikes at military bases and outposts on the border between Syria and Turkey. The civil war in Lebanon gave the PKK various Beirut redoubts, and access to a steady stream of increasingly powerful armaments and ammunition. As Turkey came under the control of a new military government, the PKK retreated to northern Iraq, where they became embroiled in the Iran-Iraq war. Their partner, the KDP (an Iraq-based wing of the Kurdistan movement) provided support to Iranian armored columns pushing into Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s response was the collective punishment of Iraq’s entire Kurdish population. His brutal Anfal campaign killed over one hundred thousand people; his army shelled Halabja with American-supplied nerve agents, enveloping at least fifteen thousand civilians in deathly clouds of gas. Humanitarian organizations looked on in horror, unable to intervene. Privately, the White House began to wonder if their material support of Saddam’s war had been a mistake. Intervention plans were drawn up, and then discarded: at the time, Ba’athist Iraq had the fourth-largest army on Earth. It would take a miscalculation of massive proportions, either by Iraq or by America, to push the two powers into conflict. And then someone miscalculated.

That someone was Hussein. In August of 1990, seeking fast capital to recoup Iraq’s many lenders, Hussein invaded Kuwait. Early 1991’s Operation Desert Storm was paired with verbal American support for a Kurdish uprising. The PKK and KDP rose up against Hussein’s garrisons in the north, but the support they had been promised never came. The rebellion was completely crushed. As Saddam’s troops limped backwards out of Kuwait, they targeted Kurdish families for summary execution wherever they could be found.

Applying long-term punishment became the West’s official Iraq policies. The relatively well-known diplomatic sanctions on Iraq were not the only punishment applied. America also enforced a no-fly zone over the Kurdish sections of the country, dropping pallets of supplies to Kurdish refugees under Operation Provide Comfort. Slowly, an autonomous Kurdish state began to emerge; its protection was a key aim of Clinton’s Operation Desert Strike and the long-running Operation Southern Watch. The Coalition in support of the Kurds fractured after 9/11. The Kurds were on their own.

A Kurdish Future, Maybe?

Since then, the PKK and its Syrian wing (the SDF) have been running a combined marathon-and-poker-game across the Middle East. The PKK has struck at Turkish defense companies and their offices, while the SDF waged a large-scale war against both Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, and the Turkey-backed SNA. With fire support by American forces, Kurdish fighters encircled ISIS’s two strongholds (Raqqa and Mosul) and obliterated the organization’s Levantine presence.

With the Syrian Civil War settled into an uneasy peace, the Kurdish autonomous region holding firm in Iraq, and the PKK supposedly dissolved in Turkey, the Kurds are in uncharted territory. The verdict on if America will choose to back an independent Kurdish nation sits somewhere between “probably not” and “anyone’s guess.” The great war for Kurdistan, a war which never formally began, is over. But, somehow, the question which sparked the war has not yet been answered: to whom do the Kurds belong?

• Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs are a coin with a public head and a private tail. While domestic analysts have made much of the tariffs’ publicized purpose (saving American manufacturing1), we might instead move to interrogate Liberation Day as a negotiation tool. Insofar as Trump believes that America is being given a raw deal, he is willing to use the massive force of tariffs to extract concessions that would never be considered in economic peacetime. I argue that this is a miscalculation. Read on to find out why.

• When threatened, Beijing’s standard operating procedure is to negotiate a way back to détente and bide its time.2 For instance, Trump’s Phase One Trade Deal was put into ink in 2020, but China pulled away at the first opportunity, leaving two hundred billion in imports on the table.3 That’s the playbook. Accede in public, dissent in private, return to the initial status quo. However, Beijing’s response to the Liberation Day tariff has been uncharacteristically harsh and brittle. This is a break with their established strategy.4 While it's impossible to know what Xi Jinping is thinking, we can speculate that he has probably grown tired of negotiations legitimized by the threat of tariffs. By my approximation, China has begun to suffer from If You Give a Mouse a Cookie Syndrome. Since they have no clear way of knowing when the litany of concessions would end, they’ve chosen instead to take a hit in hopes of being the last man standing. Make no mistake: they would not be willing to fight this trade war if they did not believe they could survive.

• That all means that the pre-Liberation Day status quo is beyond reach. We are holding each other’s heads under the water. The Second U.S.-China Trade War will be a test of sheer will: who can hold their breath the longest?

2. Lines of communication with China are breaking down.

• To understand how, we must look not at the state, but near the state. Chinese state-adjacent social media encompasses sources like family members of major city chiefs. These sources,5 which represent the views of the state with an added veneer of plausible deniability, have begun to refer to the trade war as “a war without gunsmoke.” As such, recent diplomatic gains with the Chinese state are expected to be rolled back. In some areas, we may regress to a point roughly commensurate with our position multiple decades ago.

• Under Biden, China pledged to target the laboratories that supply fentanyl precursors to the global black market. (If the flow of fentanyl precursors is disrupted, keep an eye on Afghanistan’s6 opium poppy fields.) This gesture was mostly symbolic, and its rollback represents China’s return to an unrepentant position on the American opioid crisis. Don’t Orientalize this move, though: China’s role is structural, not malevolent. The Chinese state’s culpability in the matter of fentanyl precursors is hotly contested, and this decision is not an admission of deliberate state complicity7 in the fentanyl trade, which remains contested in both policy and intelligence communities.

• This has been a long time coming8, but no one expected it to get this bad this fast. With critical food exports being canceled on both sides and state agreements erased, U.S.-China diplomatic drift will only worsen. Lethal miscalculations become orders of magnitude more likely. Indeed, if we are not careful, the consequences of diplomatic drift may become brutally apparent during the next set of military drills in Taiwanese airspace.9

3. Don’t expect to visit the Great Wall any time soon.

• China’s immigration-level responses to the trade war have ranged from the rational to the ridiculous. The state initially issued reasonable warnings10 to Chinese students studying in America, cautioning them about the rapidly shifting situation. The announcements escalated to an absurd conspiracy theory11 alleging that NSA agents embedded at the University of California and Virginia Tech had perpetuated a major cyberattack at the Asian Winter Games. The American embassy in China has not yet dignified that with a response.

• For our part, Chinese students have been scheduled for deportation (from, oddly enough, the University of California12), and other sanctions are expected to be placed on Chinese international students by the end of the week. They may even resemble our earlier expulsions13 during the prior trade war.

• For American citizens in China and Chinese citizens in America, touring, studying, and doing business is rapidly becoming inadvisable.

4. ASEAN (as we know it) will cease to exist.

• ASEAN is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations; the United States and China are its two largest trading partners.14 80.8 percent of its exports are goods.15 ASEAN is designed as a neoliberal compromise, balancing free trade agreements with outmoded Cold War narratives about Asian alliances against China. In reality, that gave ASEAN the ability to walk the tightrope,16 playing host to American naval drills while deepening ties with the Chinese economy. ASEAN’s highwire act will now come crashing to an unsightly end.

• As of Liberation Day, every single ASEAN country has been slapped with brutal tariffs: Cambodia with 49 percent, Laos 48 percent, Vietnam 46 percent, Thailand 36 percent, Indonesia 32 percent, Malaysia 24 percent, Brunei 24 percent, Philippines 17 percent, and Singapore 10 percent.17 Trump torched substantial goodwill among ASEAN’s leaders by claiming that the baseline 10% tariffs were reciprocal. The further tariffs were a deeper insult: much has been written18 about the flawed and dishonest Liberation Day tariff rates, and that is an entirely different Substack post altogether. Just know this: ASEAN is rightfully unhappy about a frankly protectionist trade policy, aimed at unseating the textile industries that keep their countries in the black. Meanwhile, Trump’s negotiation demands for ASEAN include a reduction in their interactions with China,19 the only option they have to account for the damage that protectionism will cause. The consequence is that they will have to choose one player to align with, and only one.

• Because ASEAN is currently pursuing a Singapore-led model of export-oriented industrialization20, its main goal now is to align with whatever power can offer them the most cash.21 What’s the likely outcome? In an us-versus-them battle of wills, ASEAN will probably choose China and its Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. No surprise, then, that Xi Jinping was warmly received in Malaysia yesterday, to the tune of a six billion dollar digital infrastructure deal.22 The shift to China may already be irrevocable.

5. South Asia’s economy will survive, though it will not thrive.

• South Asia has much more latitude to respond. Divide it into two blocs: those who are playing it cool, and those who aren’t.

• The chillers include Afghanistan, Bhutan, the Maldives, and Nepal, which received only the minimum 10 percent tariff. (Particularly keep an eye on Afghanistan. Despite the Taliban’s violation of the Doha Agreement,23 our government continues to give them wiggle room to do more or less whatever they want. The reasoning for this realpolitik normalization of the Taliban eludes me.) And then there’s India. After being hit with a 26 percent tariff, India lowered some of their tariffs and pledged to import more U.S. goods.24 The United States’ $45.7 billion trade deficit with India doesn’t explain their willingness to fall in line so much as the fact that New Delhi and Washington were already at the negotiating table.25 Expect to see a formalized bilateral deal soon to reduce tariffs and nontariff barriers. The U.S. may also deepen public or covert collaboration with the Indian Armed Forces, though the details of that remain to be (un-)seen.

• The other players in the region are not so easygoing about the recent tariffs. They also received the harshest sentences in South Asia: Sri Lanka was slapped with 44 percent, Bangladesh with 37 percent, and Pakistan with 29 percent. Like the targeted ASEAN nations above, Bangladesh26 and Pakistan27 are currently struggling to walk the tightrope. They also both primarily export textiles and other goods. The next few years will not be easy for them. In a worst-case scenario, the U.S. loses Bangladesh and Pakistan altogether, calling into question the entire South Asian map.

6. Arab Gulf countries will not pick a side.

• The Arab Gulf has been courting both sides for a very long time. Gulf countries now play host to new Chinese military outposts28 and Belt and Road infrastructure from the UAE to Oman. All the while, those same countries are normalizing Rubio’s hawkish ‘maximum pressure’ campaign29 against Iran. They are strategically impenetrable. The Gulf is less ‘enigmatic genius’ and more ‘relentless double-dealer with a good poker face.’

• The primary stumbling block that’s forcing the Gulf not to accede to Trump’s desires is, ironically, his tariffs. As a nation, the UAE’s margins are razor-thin. Abu Dhabi’s “Axis of Secessionists” is bathing Central Africa in blood30; Netanyahu’s patience with it is shrinking. In Israel and beyond, Qatargate31 calls into question the long-term sustainability of Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani’s rule. And who could forget about Saudi Arabia, where MBS is struggling to pretend to care about Neom32, struggling to keep a lid on the consequences of the kefala system33, and indeed struggling to maintain legitimacy at large. A sustained drop in oil prices could be catastrophic for the Saudi political order. Extreme fear is the current driver of Arab Gulf politics.

• In summary, the Gulf does not have room to choose between China and America. Like the current F1 race in Bahrain,34 one wrong move in either direction could spell total disaster. The Gulf, then, will remain on the tightrope for as long as it can.35

7. Artificial Intelligence, Hollywood, and Renewables will enter long-term freefall, but there may be no ground.

• Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader, once wrote: “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.”  This is especially pertinent in the realm of AI, where historic developments sometimes take shape in a matter of days or weeks. The reality here is that AI collaboration with Beijing never amounted to much of anything. When we did engage them on AI development, we did so destructively36 rather than collaboratively. Though tariffs are currently impeding our access to cutting-edge AI-capable chips37, negotiations with Taiwan might restore access to them sooner than we expect. The opportunity cost of tariffs on AI-capable goods is impossible to assess, since their development is inherently unpredictable: there is no ground. Being locked out of Chinese innovations is not a real concern either, as they’ve always kept new cards very close to the vest; cooperative summits38 were primarily gestures of shared restraint. In either case, we have no way of knowing what we are (or aren’t) missing out on.

• Word on the street is that renewables are the future. The real debate is now the speed at which they are rolled out, and how much state interaction in that rollout is advisable. There’s similarly no room left for debate when it comes to what nation is winning the race as of today, and it isn’t us.39 Trump seeks to isolate America to develop an energy industry that is devoid of Chinese dollars and far-removed from Chinese companies. The problem with renewable protectionism40 is that complacency will develop in the market. Consider Japan. Government-protected, insular telecom firms became exporters of technological development, just as intended. These firms were protected by tariffs, inward-facing, and favorites of the state without being state-run. It worked for about half a decade. When Tokyo’s insularity meant that they missed the boat on Silicon Valley innovation, the policy revealed its long-term consequences. We should be trusting the market to identify the strongest player in green energy. Keeping our industry cloistered will leave us in the junkyard.

• Supposedly, Beijing is done41 importing American films. This is a bluff, and I don’t buy it. The Chinese box office is in turmoil.42 In turn, major Hollywood studios have become increasingly reliant on the much-maligned “China market,” which is, for the most part, the same as the American market. I’m aware I’m working against the common consensus here, but stick with me for a minute. The average moviegoer buys a ticket because of positive word of mouth, because a major star they recognize is on the poster, or because they want to see what becomes of the heroes in the explosive new installment of their favorite franchise. This is true of both China and the West.43 And while much has been made of the success of Ne Zha II44, it’s not quite evidence that China is ready to do without American films. It’s sort of like Top Gun: Maverick. A thrilling epic drawing on our sacred national mythology is not going to fly (pun intended) in China. Especially not with the Taiwanese flag45 in it. Likewise, Ne Zha II’s Chinese nationalism will necessarily leave American audiences cold. Here’s the outcome: the Chinese theater industry is on thin ice46, and it can’t survive without our cultural exports. Don’t worry about Hollywood. There are bigger things to focus on.

8. Economic decoupling is shifting from an impossibility to a reality.

• Yes, really.47 Mind the gap, as it will be almost eight trillion dollars wide.48

9. The prepared will inherit the Earth.

• Apple and Amazon are going to have it fairly easy. Why? They prepared.49 These firms have developed two keys that open the same door. Both rely on a willingness to throw capital behind policies that violate core tenets of market efficiency.

• The first key is stockpiling, which they’ve been doing. They saw a ten percent jump in shipped phones last year50, with a particular emphasis on October, November, and December. Note that in this context, shipped does not necessarily mean sold. We have no way of knowing what percent of shipped units went on sale, but we know from interviews with executives that Apple has a substantial stockpile of units in reserve. Amazon has been pursuing the same strategy, canceling contracts with Chinese sellers and suppliers51 while insulating its supply chains with the development of product reserves.

• The second option is direct negotiation. If stockpiling is the key that unlatches the deadbolt, this is what opens the door. Apple and Amazon, among other major players, contributed symbolic good-faith donations to Trump’s inauguration.52 Musk’s continued presence in the White House is an inarguable confirmation of Trump’s willingness to court Big Tech, even in the realm of billion-dollar handshake deals.53 Perhaps that’s why Apple was able to covertly ‘airlift’ an extra 1.5 million iPhones out of India without being subject to tariffs.54 Time will tell. It is difficult, however, to imagine a tech industry that does not leverage quiet administrative deals to keep its head above water.

10. You are not allowed to complain.

• Both China and the United States have engaged in dissent-silencing over the tariffs, up to the highest level of government.

• Xi Jinping has a zero-tolerance policy55 for complainers. His “no whiners allowed” provision has been extended from its usual scale of domestic enterprises to America,56 as well. Echoing Leninist political discipline, it is difficult to imagine a world in which China allows much latitude for discourse on the trade war.

• Interestingly, one of the world’s most talented manufacturing strategists has been asked not to comment on the Liberation Day tariffs. Elon Musk’s ideal world57 involves 0% tariffs on most countries and a negotiation-based strategy, which has rapidly made him a pariah in economic discussions at the White House. Notable conservative economists like Thomas Sowell are joining him in condemnation58 of the tariffs. The longer this split continues, the more likely it is to grow into another thorny point of contention between Trump’s administration and classical conservatism. It would neither be the first time nor the last.

The Origins of Modern Political Order in Iran

We open in 1925, at the advent of Iranian defensive developmentalism. Threatened by the Bolsheviks to the North and the Ottoman Empire in the Caucasus to the West, the ailing Qajar dynasty was internally overthrown by Reza Khan. Within a few weeks, he named himself Reza Shah Pahlavi (literal translation: Reza “God-King” Pahlavi) and began to aggressively modernize the country. Railroads and water infrastructure were developed into rural zones at an exceptionally rapid clip; a small cloister of monarchistic governors bloomed into a large and lavish bureaucracy. The predecessors to the notorious S.A.V.A.K. were established to suppress dissent in the core of the country. The Pahlavi dynasty was born.

Unsurprisingly, this caught the eye of Great Britain, which appreciated his secularization and rapid development, which recalled Türkiye’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Determined not to alienate another secular statesman in the Middle East (see the Chanak crisis, when Churchill nearly went to war with Atatürk) the British wished to court R.S.P., with minimal success. Instead, Pahlavi played the gracious host to Nazi scientists as early as 1939, in exchange for ideological resources like the propagandistic German (pseudo-)Scientific Library to Iran. Ties deepened; a joint base was established. Suddenly, Nazi battalions were within striking range of the Soviets. In response, Britain and the USSR elected to topple Reza Shah. Armored columns divided Iran and crushed the Shah’s forces. The conquering nations took full control of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, exacting a massive profit over the course of the war. R.S.P.’s reign was officially over.

In order to develop the illusion of Iranian sovereignty, the Allies installed R.S.P.’s son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, into power. M.R.P. was a generally weak ruler, under the thumb of the Allies, oil interests, and his own parliament. The peace, however, held. WWII ended. We officially enter the realm of post-war parapolitics, the territory of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It is in this context that Iran entered its years of crisis.

Years of Fire, Years of Lead

In 1946, the same year of the Bikini Atoll Tests, the Allies parted ways in Iran. In what became known as the Azerbaijan crisis, the Red Army continued to occupy Iranian territory long after they were intended to leave. Though the United States successfully persuaded the USSR to leave the territory, the consequences included the destruction of the only Kurdish state to ever gain practical power, laying the groundwork for the persecution of Kurds which continues into the modern day. There was, however, another long-term consequence of this rough exit. The weight of the nuclear tests, exerted through American pressure on Stalin’s armies, demonstrated to Iran just how powerful a nuclear showcase could be.

In 1949, not long after the end of the Berlin Blockade, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Mossadegh was a walking paradox. He was related by blood to the deposed rulers of the Qajar Dynasty, leading the Shah to believe that he was a radical Qajarist. The West, pathologically afraid of Communism on account of recent events in Berlin and elsewhere, believed him to be a Soviet asset. The Soviets, for their part, denounced him as an American puppet. In reality, he was neither. His parliamentary record shows him to be a cunning coalition-builder, willing to fight for the rights of Iranian women when it benefited him. His nationalization of the A.I.O.C can be best interpreted as a post-ideological move: a selfishly power-seeking act that had little connection to any prevailing ideology of political economy. Iranian national sovereignty was his goal, at the cost of all other national interests. Mossadegh did not want oil power to be socialized or Westernized, he wanted it to be as Iranian as possible. And most of all, he wanted to be loved.

It worked. Mossadegh immediately became a national hero and nationalist icon. Despite gaining vast favor among Iranians, Mossadegh was despised by the West. They cut their purchases from the newly nationalized A.I.O.C. and pushed their allies to do the same. The Company’s revenue plummeted. Viewing the incipient crisis as a threat to his power and life (perhaps, in his mind, orchestrated by the Qajar-heritage Mossadegh) Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled the country. The self-styled god-emperor had abdicated. The country was now in a state of flux.

Enter Ajax, 1953. The CIA and MI6 sold Eisenhower a bold story: Mossadegh as a Soviet agent. Reluctantly, he signed the dotted line. The result was Operation Ajax. American paramilitaries armed dissatisfied loyalist officers, who marched on Mossadegh’s residence and various oil installations. Radio broadcasts transmitted readings of forged documents asserting Mossadegh’s culpability in an anti-Shah coup. Military officers, marja’ (literal translation: “sources to follow,” Shia Muslim clerics) and organized crime figures were paid off to traffic weapons and organize vast street protests with flows of money and free transportation. Mob violence began to sweep Tehran. Mossadegh called it quits; he was then rapidly tried and placed on house arrest until his death. The Shah returned from exile to a transformed country.

The coup was a short-term political victory but a total ideological loss. The average Iranian citizen quickly realized that the Shah’s return to power had been Western-engineered. CIA units remained anchored in Iran, training the Shah’s S.A.V.A.K. secret police. S.A.V.A.K. served as the Shah’s narrative-controllers, abducting and torturing dissidents with impunity. S.A.V.A.K.’s dissent-silencing practices became so unpopular that they were falsely accused of what was at the time the deadliest terrorist attack in history (but that’s not until later), an allegation that most Iranians believed. S.A.V.A.K.’s torture program was so effective that it drove democratic advocates and radical Islamists alike underground. Chief among them was a man named Khomeini, who left Iran in fear, but would return as an ayatollah.

It was at this critical juncture, a hinge point in Iranian politics, that the Shah once again engaged in defensive developmentalism. His program was known as the White Revolution, and it lasted from 1963 to 1979. It entailed rapid secularization, rapid gains in women’s rights, changes to the system of land distribution, and liberal reforms across the economy. These changes were economically alienating to the bazaar sellers who distributed basic goods, and intensified the scale and scope of urban poverty. Peasants were alienated by the neoliberal land ownership policy, while Muslim leadership was greatly disturbed by societal reforms.

The final stage of defensive developmentalism as practiced by the Shah was the first grasp at the atom. It happened under Eisenhower, as part of his ‘Atoms for Peace’ policy. The stated goal was to unleash the power of nuclear energy across the world, but there was a secondary strategic purpose: to allocate the atom to nonaligned or loosely aligned nations in order to persuade them not to consort with the Soviets. In Iran’s case, that meant American scientists on the ground, and deliveries of uranium both in its enriched and unenriched forms. MIT and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission even collaborated to develop a nuclear research reactor in Tehran, the first of its kind. By 1967 Iran planned to build 25 nuclear reactors, with a blueprint for a fully nuclear-powered national grid, freeing up all oil reserves to be exported. Three years later, acknowledging the ease with which atoms for peace could become atoms of war, Iran joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Shah made public his vision for the future: Iran as another Japan, a former Axis power turned powerful friend of the West. The seeds of revolution, however, were soon to spawn a thick mass of weeds which broke through his well-laid plans.

Falling Upwards and Rising Downwards

The early 1970s should have been Iran’s best years, but they quickly morphed into a decadent nightmare. The discovery of large oil reserves (paired with a boom in global oil demand) vastly increased the rate of cash flow into the nation. Inflation reshaped the economy, entrenching the urban poor into a state of subsistence. Basic necessities multiplied in price. Meanwhile, Tehran began to replace Beirut as the party capital of the Middle East. Diplomats from across the Muslim world rubbed shoulders with East Coast nuclear physicists and Texas oil magnates. Billions of dollars were allocated by the Shah to the purchases of American rockets and bombs. The monumental royal residences at Persepolis were twice renovated and barely used.

Enter the Iranian opposition. Pursued by S.A.V.A.K. into a state of European exile, they were broken, but patiently waiting for a charismatic leader to fix them. That leader came in the form of Ruhollah Khomeini, living at the time in Paris. An acquaintance of postmodernist Michel Foucault, Khomeini’s ideas were a synthesis of Salafism (Sunni fundamentalist reform) and anti-colonial, anti-Western thought. Khomeini’s lectures on this synthesis were smuggled back into Iran via samizdat cassette tape, where they spread like wildfire through the large population of alienated youths. Like the nuclear fission taking place in underground labs beneath the sands, the process of political decay quickly became unstoppable. The state began to squirm.

In such periods of political decay, political theorist Francis Fukuyama argues that a vicious cycle is all but inevitable. When legitimacy-troubled states fail to live up to expectations, distrust in the state is reinforced and validated, leading to less investment by the people into the state, leading to further failures of the state. The example of Iran, however, proves that states don’t just fail: sometimes, they actively hurt their own cause. Take, for instance, Ayandegan. A government-approved newspaper, Ayandegan repudiated Khomeini’s rising influence. Student protestors mobilized to condemn what they perceived as a grave insult. Local authorities, supported by S.A.V.A.K., opened fire on the protestors. As the 40 Days of Arbaeen (a Shia festival of mourning for Hussain ibn Ali) began, religious commemoration merged with student protests. The urban poor joined forces with the previously disbanded leftist movements and rushed into the streets. Oil workers put down their tools and went on strike, en masse, from distant oilfields to local utility plants. The country was now on fire.

1978. Iranian state institutions entered their most difficult summer since the fall of the Qajar dynasty. In August, a fire at the Rex Cinema struck a kaleidoscopic terror into the heart of the country. It was a day of body bags and contradictions: more than four hundred people burned to death in a theater with all the doors chained and padlocked. Every single fact of the case was paired with another competing fact: the cinema often showed anti-government films, but the fire broke out during a government-approved drama. The government claimed that Khomeini’s underground network of revolutionaries was responsible, but the general public placed the blame on S.A.V.A.K., who they claimed had used the fire to dispose of various revolutionary outlaws. The summer simmered and again exploded in September, when martial law was declared. The military promptly broke protests by shooting thousands and killing hundreds; the last shreds of belief in a peaceful reconciliation were tossed aside. As the year came to an end, the Shah attempted a panicked restructuring of the government, but nearly the entire civil service was on strike. There was no one to execute the new legislation. In January of 1979 he left Iran, never to return. A month later, Khomeini returned, finding himself the nation’s supreme leader.

The collective trauma of state violence rapidly coalesced into revolutionary fervor. Power players fled the country, taking permanent vacations to Switzerland and the United States. Elites moved their money offshore and foreign investment slowed. An inordinate amount of the remaining population began to support the development of an Islamic Republic, with approval supposedly polling at over 98%. The structure of the Shah’s government was erased and the constitution was rewritten. The players which had supported the White Revolution were executed. Velayat-e Faqih (literal translation: rule of the jurist) was imposed, instituting a baroque system of multilayered ‘approvals’ for elected and appointed figures. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps replaced S.A.V.A.K., though dozens of torturers and signals intelligence workers were retained. The I.R.G.C. also took possession of the American-trained nuclear scientists. The raw potential of the atom was now in the hands of the Islamic Revolution.

The First Years of the Islamic Revolutionary Government

In the South Atlantic Ocean, an American satellite spotted two flashes on the horizon. Analysts believed that the flash was a joint nuclear test by Israel and South Africa, in violation of international law. September 1979 thus represented the first indication that major powers in the Middle East and Africa would someday have access to nuclear arsenals. An Iranian nuclear weapons program was no longer an impossibility.

One month later, in the wake of the White Revolution and Islamic Revolution, defensive developmentalism would again rear its head in Iran. This time, it emerged on account of a hostage crisis and a doomed fleet of helicopters. It started in October of 1979, when the exiled Shah’s American visa was accepted by the Carter administration. Though he was seeking treatment for an aggressive cancer, the Iranian population interpreted his visit as a precursor to a re-do of Operation Ajax. Anti-American sentiment exploded; young Iranians for the first time began adopting Khomeini’s rhetoric, including such phrases as “the Great Satan” and “death to America.” The American embassy was identified, then, as the core of a pernicious Western influence which supposedly stood to push Iran into deeper chaos. After days of protests, the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line (a non-state actor) broke through the gates and seized the facility. Sixty-five American hostages were taken; thirteen of them, primarily women, were released early. The fifty-two that remained were treated to grueling interrogation, solitary confinement, and weeks of imprisonment. In America, yellow ribbons became a symbol of remembrance and hope for the fate of the hostages, evoking the later use of the yellow ribbon in the wake of the October 7th attacks and hostage-taking by Hamas. The four hundred and forty four days of confinement served to deepen and institutionalize anti-American sentiment in Iran, making combating America a primary directive of state institutions. The most disastrous moment of the hostage crisis was Operation Eagle Claw, wherein Delta Force suffered a series of mechanical failures at a remote airstrip inside Iran. A haboob, which Khomeini declared an “act of God,” obscured visibility and led to a fiery crash that killed eight soldiers. The blackened wreckage, sitting sunburned in the sand, served as a signal to Iranian leadership: America was coming for them.

As Carter’s presidency came to an end, Algerian diplomats mediated the release of the hostages, supposedly in exchange for the freeing-up of Iranian assets as well as concessions across the Islamic world. In reality, the Iranian government was primarily motivated by the rise of Ronald Reagan, who projected a vision of military strength and offered a series of public and covert opportunities to the Iranian state and military. The hostages were released just minutes after his inauguration.

The following year, Iran became embroiled in an eight-year conflict which taught them two apocalyptic lessons about defensive developmentalism. That conflict was the Iran-Iraq war, sparked by various events on the border between the two nations, including Ayatollah-backed Shia uprisings in Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s expansionist treatment of shared waterways. Iraq’s forces were pushed back on the defensive, where the conflict stalled into bloody foot-by-foot trench warfare and human wave attacks. Worried about escalation of Iranian power, the United States supplied chemical weapons like mustard gas to Saddam Hussein. This open secret, upon reaching Khomeini, taught him a major wartime lesson about defensive developmentalism: America was willing to escalate the grade of weaponry in order to contain Iran. Iran responded in kind, releasing Tabun and Sarin onto the battlefield. For the final four years of the war, the United States Navy regularly smashed through Iranian naval supply lines in what became known as the ‘Tanker War.’ Not long before the end of the war, the USS Vincennes unintentionally shot down Iran Air Flight 655. Through the war and into the stalemate, American leadership viewed their position as one of nonalignment and power-balancing, while Iran viewed them as a discrete combatant pulling the strings of the enemy leadership.

However, as noted above, the war held for Iran a second lesson about defensive developmentalism. If American support of Saddam was an open secret, then this second lesson was a closed secret inside an open one. In the West, we know it as the Iran-Contras Affair. In order to raise money for Latin American anticommunist militants who were condemned by Congress, Reagan’s executive branch ultra-covertly sold arms to Iran. Amid the war with Iraq, the Ayatollah received TOW anti-tank missiles, Hawk anti-aircraft systems, and spare parts for tanks. These were advanced targeted munitions, a flagrant violation of the arms embargo against the country. The lesson learned by Iran was that covert exchanges of money led to fruitful results. The Iran-Contras Affair gave Iran the network required to launder money, trick and coerce trade inspectors, and double-deal outside of international law. These dirty tricks, taught in the name of global peace, would become the foundation of the nuclear program that the Ayatollah had always wanted.

Multiple Deaths and the Conqueror Worm

In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini suffered five heart attacks in a single day. He died that night, thus ending the first Islamic Revolutionary government of Iran. He was succeeded by the similarly named Khamenei, though they have many practical differences in government. The first Ayatollah had a cult following and was a Sufi, a gnostic and ascetic devotee of Islam who assigned a mystical character to the religion. His successor, Khamenei, who remains in power today, is far more practical. Khamenei transformed the Iranian state’s foreign policy into a complex web of state and non-state actors from the Levant to Central Asia, working towards the degradation of American and Israeli interests. Khamenei’s government has also persecuted Sufis and other mystical practitioners of Islam, marking a substantial departure from his predecessor’s religious views. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that Khamenei’s Iran is regularly rocked by protests and crises of legitimacy, consistently put down by force. And there is, as you will see, a profound symmetry at play between this political decay and the rise of nuclear Iran.

Not long after the death of the First Ayatollah, the world was reshaped by the collapse of the USSR. Hundreds of tons of nuclear material were smuggled out of the country and into Central Asia, where it vanished into the wild steppes (read: black markets) of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The new Ayatollah approached various nations in the early 1990s about the possibility of nuclear acquisition, chief among them China, the Russian Federation, and Pakistan. Pacts of cooperation were signed with the first two and then dropped on account of American pressure; though limited cooperation may still have occurred, little evidence of it remains. A secret Pakistani network was the real means of support for Iran, supplying them with raw nuclear material. Late that decade, the Amad Plan was approved, ordering the development of a five-weapon rocket arsenal over five years. Everything was falling into place, except one detail: despite access to nuclear material in its raw form, the I.R.G.C. could not get their hands on anywhere near enough refined uranium or plutonium. This race for refined material became the defining feature of Iranian nuclear politics for decades, up to the present day.

The next development came in 2002, when the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, a former armed dissident group, arrived in Washington, D.C. with a detail-heavy slideshow. They revealed the existence of Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz and Arak, already advancing towards the development of a nuclear arsenal. The International Atomic Energy Agency awakened from their slumber to confirm that the allegations held weight. With extreme international pressure frightening Iran into submission, a cessation agreement was reached with the European Union.

The pause, however, did not hold. Two years after the agreement, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidency after being approved by the Supreme Leader. Ahmadinejad was an Islamist hardliner, an extreme anti-Western personality, and he restarted development almost immediately. The nation withdrew its earlier nuclear security commitments. Development rapidly progressed again, even in the face of crushing global sanctions. It wasn’t the thunderstorm of sanctions, but a tiny worm that stopped the nuclear program in its tracks.

The Stuxnet worm was the product of Operation Olympic Games, the result of collaboration between the NSA and Mossad. At an undisclosed location in the Negev desert, Israel used satellite footage and defector testimony to create a functioning full-scale replica of the Iranian nuclear laboratories. Since the program ran on Windows, the worm was able to exploit simple vulnerabilities: nodes called Siemens PLCs (programmable logic controllers) that control the rate at which centrifuges spin. Stuxnet, then, had two goals: first, to rapidly replicate itself and spread throughout a network, and second, to physically disable the system. The worm simply raised the speed of rotation to inadvisable levels and waited for the damage to appear. More than a thousand centrifuges were thus permanently disabled. A year after the conclusion of the operation, in 2010, researchers discovered the worm; two years later, its existence was revealed in a New York Times headline. Iran hit back, targeting American and Israeli businesses, as well as Saudi Aramco and other Western-aligned Arab oil companies. Undeterred, the Ayatollah was not destroyed by Stuxnet, though it did manage to slow him down.

The same year Stuxnet was released, Benjamin Netanyahu began his second term as the Prime Minister of Israel. Netanyahu’s consistent position is that Iranian nuclear weapons represent an existential threat to Israel, one which must be stopped no matter the implications for international security. Thus, Mossad began a campaign of targeted assassination. In the heart of Tehran, five nuclear scientists were assassinated by a combination of car bombs and motorcycle-driving gunmen. The program of targeted assassination successfully brought Iran back to the table for the J.C.P.O.A., one of the most notorious gambits in all of nuclear history.

The Plan and its Consequences

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., was an Obama-era policy designed to contain Iran by offering them a major concession: the lifting of those total sanctions mentioned above. In exchange, Iran had to once again commit to Atoms for Peace. They would be under constant monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency, who would verify that they were enriching only small amounts of uranium in certain archaic types of centrifuges, only for the purposes of nuclear energy. After months of grueling negotiation in Vienna, billions in financial assets (including, notoriously, hundreds of pallets of unmarked cash) were rapidly unfrozen. However, the Iranian economy stumbled, expecting Western investment that never came. Less than two years after the Plan was instituted, in 2018, Trump pulled out of it, claiming that it was a bad deal. His rationale stemmed primarily from the Plan’s ‘sunset clauses,’ which predetermined the time at which the terms of the deal would no longer apply. It should be noted that he also expressed realpolitik concerns about Iran’s rising support of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, both recipients (via the I.R.G.C.) of major weapons shipments. As the Plan collapsed, the State Department resumed total sanctions against Iran. Almost immediately, nuclear enrichment resumed. Iran was again moving towards the development of a nuclear arsenal.

Here’s the billion dollar question: was the J.C.P.O.A. effective? Well, it depends who you ask. In terms of containing nuclear weapons proliferation, it was rather effective. The International Atomic Energy Agency never found any evidence to suggest that extraneous enrichment was happening, or that Iran was extracting nuclear material outside the terms of the deal. Access to facilities was nearly total, a huge expansion compared to the non-Plan status quo. For a few years, the I.A.E.A. could go wherever they wanted, and see whatever they wanted. Facilities consistently passed inspections of the snap and scheduled variety, and I.A.E.A. employees themselves regularly passed anti-corruption probes. In terms of containing baseline nuclear proliferation, it was of course ineffective: deal or no deal, Iran was always going to attempt to enrich uranium for ostensibly peaceful purposes. The value of the Plan was not that it stopped enrichment but allowed the West to contain it to a reasonable level and monitor it as it occurred. However, the Plan can be considered a failure in other fields. Iran’s economy never reached predicted or promised levels; Western companies never considered Tehran a home for reasonable and safe investment. The I.R.G.C. never reduced global interactions with armed groups, and Iran remained a state sponsor of terror. Bonds with Syria’s Assad regime were strengthened rather than weakened, frustrating the State Department. In summation, assessing the Plan is less a question of ‘good or no good,’ and more a matter of ‘good here, bad there.’ The Plan’s consequences are of vastly different orders and resist rational evaluation. You are welcome to try to compare a Smyrna fig to a Jericho date, even eat a bushel of the fruits, but don’t expect to get anything out of it but a stomachache.

Pen and Paper Failed, or, Falling Back to Bullets

Two years after the breakdown of the Deal, the program of targeted assassination resumed. On the 3rd of January 2020, General Qasem Soleimani was assassinated by a rocket fired from a Predator drone. He was the leader of the I.R.G.C.’s Quds Force, their major anti-Israel battalion, which organizes the flow of money, weapons, and combat plans to groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis. On the 5th of January, Iran officially broke the last remaining tenet of the J.C.P.O.A. and declared their intent to acquire more nuclear centrifuges. On the 8th of January, they launched Operation Martyr Solemani, firing twelve ballistic missiles at American positions in Iraq. One hundred and ten American servicemen suffered traumatic brain injuries as a result of the attack.

The same afternoon, the I.R.G.C. shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, echoing the shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655. Both Iran and America then stood down, preserving the region from the risk of a larger conflagration. Further investigation revealed that the plane had been misidentified as an American cruise missile, sparking another wave of the long-term protests which continue to shake the foundations of the Iranian state.

The Raketen-Stadt and the End of History

Today, the Ayatollah rules a deeply unsteady state which nears collapse. Political decay has hollowed out most economic and governmental institutions within the nation. The average Iranian is politically disenfranchised and hates both the West and their leaders. Everyday Iranians no longer trust their government or their military to defend and protect them. They grow tired of the ‘morality police’ and the persecution of Sufi figures like Noor Ali Tabandeh. The Assad regime has been toppled in Syria. Iran is unlikely to ever recover the power it invested in Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. And Trump and Netanyahu speak openly of airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities if a new nuclear deal is not reached. This morning, Al Jazeera reported that Iran will for the first time come to the table for direct nuclear negotiation with the United States of America. The talks will occur in Moscow. If Trump somehow manages to extract major concessions from the Ayatollah, there is a nonzero chance that the resultant unrest could topple the Iranian regime.

It increasingly appears that the Ayatollah’s last hope to unite his people is a catastrophic total war against Israel and the United States. Last year’s two-hundred missile launch against Tel Aviv and recent escalations in the Red Sea imply that he may be courting this possibility. His use of propaganda would certainly indicate this. “Only four hundred seconds to Tel Aviv,” one such poster goes, referring to the Fattah-1 hypersonic rocket. It’s unclear whether or not the Israeli Iron Dome would be able to withstand a hypersonic rocket, especially if loaded with cluster munitions or a nuclear warhead with maneuverable reentry capabilities. But perhaps clarity isn’t the point.

Maybe the point is theatrics; as Pynchon defines them. War-theater as system maintenance, test launches into the ocean as a way of proving that the rockets can get to Tel Aviv so that they never actually have to. And maybe Fukuyama’s thesis about the End of History and political order isn’t right. Maybe the Iranian regime is using war theater as a form of long-term stability, keeping the people quiet by making promises about the destruction of Israel. Finally, whether or not Iran continues to practice defensive developmentalism is a matter of contention. Some might argue that the American nuclear talks are a desperate re-strategization in order to keep the practice alive. Others would argue that martyrdom has become the point, and developing a nuclear program is a guaranteed and tested way of threatening the West and forcing us to come to the table. To me, it seems now that Iran is simply buying time, fighting against Pynchon’s notion of historical Gravity. “The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time,” he says of the Raketen-Stadt in Gravity’s Rainbow. “And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death… dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide… though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker…”