00:01 – Bree Fram
Welcome back to the Steady State Sentinel. I’m Bree Fram, a retired Space Force colonel and astronautical engineer forced out by the Trump administration. Like so many of the people that we have, it’s a challenge to figure out what is it that we do to hold on to our oath. What got us into national security? And what do we do with the knowledge that we’ve gained? So that’s why I’m really excited today to be talking with Julia Curlee.
Julia is a public service fellow at Lawfare and a former CIA analyst with 25 years of experience in national security. She served as a National Security Council director in the Biden and second Trump White Houses and as a presidential daily brief briefer to the vice president. She completed multiple tours in the Middle East and South Asia and served in CIA’s China Mission Center. She holds master’s degrees from the National War College and American University.
Julia, thanks for joining us on the Sentinel.
01:00 – Julia Curlee
Wonderful. Thanks, Bree. You make me sound really old. That’s quite the list of things. But no, I’m thrilled to be here and talk with you. And full disclosure, I not only do not represent the views of the United States government, but Bree and I are friends.
01:17 – Bree Fram
Yeah, how dare we get into this without saying that I actually know you? As many people who have been tossed out do, but also who have been in this fight for so long and are now speaking out, tends to be those circles close up quite a bit. But what I really wanted to get into to start off this with you was kind of your motivation for why this kind of career. Why dive into something that is behind the shadows that I know you now are just letting a little peek into? Even with that, disclaimers abound, but you jumped into something where people are not going to know about the vast majority of what you did throughout your career. Why did you join the CIA and get into something that is so challenging for so many people to understand?
02:12 – Julia Curlee
You know, I don’t even know really where it came from. I grew up in Hawaii. I was a barefoot kid on the beach for most of my feral childhood. And from nowhere I got this wanderlust, this desire to see the world. And it probably was The Hunt for Red October – who am I kidding? The movie where the analyst is the hero, I will note. And so I got it in my head when I was weirdly young that a career at the CIA would be for me. I was very fortunate to get to live out that dream. I did multiple tours in war zones, and there were ups and downs along the way, but it was a wonderful career. I deeply miss still being a part of CIA. I loved its mission, I love its people, I love it still. And here we are podcasting instead of working in the national security infrastructure, but nonetheless, public service carries on. So I’m happy to be able to be here with you today.
03:14 – Bree Fram
I think that’s one of the big things that people need to understand about these ongoing purges all around and making life for federal workers so hellish is the brain drain that we’re losing. Both you and I likely would have been doing this kind of career for another 10 plus years in an alternate universe where the value of intelligence wasn’t demeaned, where the consideration of outside opinions actually mattered. We would still likely be in positions supporting our national security and the government. But that kind of flows into what I want to talk about with you: the bulk of our conversation is the value of intelligence. And why the production of intelligence – that analyst piece that you saw and said, “My God, that’s actually important” – why that matters and why doing it in a rigorous, fact-based way matters. So let’s start by telling me about how is intelligence used at the highest levels of government and how should it be used.
04:24 – Julia Curlee
So there are various definitions of intelligence, but I think the simplest way to describe it is it’s information made useful and information made so that one could not misunderstand the message. Information put in the right context to help a policymaker make the right decisions. The information that flows out of smoky bars overseas or is intercepted out of the airwaves by NSA – all of that is raw reporting. While we could call it intelligence, it doesn’t really provide the policymaker what they need.
Not having intelligence – not just being a pun here – results in terrible decisions. As we’ve seen several times in our adult lives, where either intelligence was cherry-picked or alternative views were shut out, it leads to terrible decisions on behalf of the United States. All of us have suffered from it, whether it’s the Iraq WMD fiasco or all the way to the present with the Iran war. I’d be happy to get into more details on how a report makes its way through the ecosystem, how a bill becomes a law, if that would help.
05:39 – Bree Fram
Yeah, I want to dive into a little bit more a word you mentioned there: context. When you get that raw report from the field on something that has happened or something has been identified, by the time it makes it to a president, to a senior official in the government, there’s a lot of context that normally is added to that. How does that occur and how do people inject themselves into that to decide what context is relevant to our senior leaders?
06:19 – Julia Curlee
Putting it in context probably takes place at every single level of the intelligence cycle, which is the phrase we use for it. A meeting happens in a bar, the case officer can tell you if they have existing relationships, they put the meeting and the person in context so that the individual report comes back. Somebody back in Washington is reading these reports, they’re looking at all of the information that individual source has said over time, putting that in context, kicking it over to the analyst who made an entire profession about putting things in context. Where does this one report fit in with the pattern of behavior we are seeing from the country, from past instances, what we know to be the trajectory of events?
At each one of these layers, there’s an entire profession devoted to having the expertise to do the best possible work on behalf ultimately of a customer of one at the top who will make the final decisions. Once the analysts have worked through these hard problems, put things in context, say, “Yeah, this report doesn’t work, this one does,” then it gets transmitted onward in the form of finished analysis to policymakers – whether that is at the National Security Council, the Secretary of State, Defense, or ultimately the premier product that the intelligence community produces, the PDB, the President’s Daily Brief. Despite its name, not only the president receives the President’s Daily Brief, and unfortunately under this president, the president doesn’t normally read it. But it does serve as a valuable context leveling across the U.S. government so that everybody has the same set of facts and the same basic analysis to help them make good decisions.
07:58 – Bree Fram
So you were a presidential daily brief briefer, and I want to talk eventually about some of the gates it reaches before that, but when it finally got to you and you were the one providing that update, did you still feel it was your job to add additional context, or what did you have to be aware of to be able to provide this brief as the lead briefer?
08:28 – Julia Curlee
To use the Office Space line, we talk to the customer, right? We’re that final step to deliver the piece of information. As much as analysts like me would love to believe that you just throw the paper over the wall and there’s a policymaker waiting to catch it and they will just do whatever you tell them to do, that doesn’t happen. A human – in the case of the top officials of our government – receives a morning briefing where they have a live person, often with at least 10 to 20 years of experience in the intelligence community, often with deep regional or functional knowledge themselves, that can walk them through these reports and speed them through so they don’t miss anything.
What I’ll say about the individual briefer: this is a job like no other. This is a job where you’re rolling in at midnight, where your loved ones will probably see the indentation in the pillow but not the person themselves, where you’re spending all night like in an all-night cram session for an exam every morning and you don’t know what subjects are going to be tested. You learn the information consumption styles of customers because it’s their needs that have to come first.
Famously, George W. Bush preferred an oral briefing. Barack Obama was a reader. He for some reason didn’t want a CIA analyst staring at him while he was reading the PDB. As a policy customer at one point, I also felt it was a little weird to have somebody staring at me, but I like a hybrid approach – I would read the piece first and then ask them questions and engage in that kind of dialogue. It’s in that context that you can task out your questions, which get scurried back to Langley where legions of analysts are waiting, and they’re going to work while you go to bed. You try to get a few hours of sleep if you’ve got to wake up at midnight, and hopefully there’s a paper waiting for you in the morning that will answer the policymakers’ questions. It’s a great customer service oriented business, but high stakes. I was very lucky to get to travel around the world with the vice president.
11:03 – Bree Fram
When you’re presenting that information, there is often a confidence level associated with it. How do you convey that, in particular when it is low? What is the challenge that these briefers or the generators of intelligence along the way face in providing the sort of confidence that allows good decision making?
11:27 – Julia Curlee
The use of estimative language and confidence levels is often misunderstood. Sometimes it’s an effort to put quantities or numbers behind the language that we use. You’ll have live debates over whether twenty‑five percent likely is “unlikely,” is it “possible,” is it “probable” – there’s lots of analyst‑on‑analyst violence over what means what. It’s very difficult, which is why having a live human is really good.
One key point worth making: the United States collects a tremendous amount of information. We had this joke that you could basically construct any narrative you wanted based on what we’d already collected. If your theory is that aliens stole the election, almost certainly there’s going to be a report of an alien visitation and attempted manipulation of voting machines. If you were having to present that to a customer saying, “Well, we have intelligence saying the aliens visited,” you’d probably also offer a low confidence estimate – whether because of the subject, the obvious issues with that statement, or that the sourcing is a little bit weak, second or third hand. It’s another attempt to make sure the policymaker doesn’t misunderstand what we’re trying to convey.
12:51 – Bree Fram
I certainly had some of that experience with a little bit of our signals intelligence pipeline and just seeing how massive it is – and that’s one type of intelligence from one area. There is a massive amount collected every day, every second, and there is a natural funneling of this. We talked a little bit about the context and about some of these organizations where more and more is put in and fused together along the way. But you had a lot of experience near the top of that funnel. While those analysts in the field may be adding some context or maybe taking two or three different sources and pulling it together, by the time it gets to the Director of National Intelligence or the National Security Council, it’s already passed through a lot of gates where some is filtered out, some moves on, and you’re getting towards the top of what ends up in that briefing that you provided. But I want to dig into those two organizations, and you’ve recently written about both. So let’s start with the DNI. We recently had Jay Clayton confirmed as the new director of national intelligence, but in the meantime, for a little while, we had Bill Poulte. And you wrote of him as “the apotheosis of incompetence and malevolence.” What is the danger of having someone that can be described that way even in an interim role at the DNI?
14:33 – Julia Curlee
We should do a brief history lesson on where the DNI came from. For most of the U.S. intelligence community’s history, there was not a DNI, which meant that you have all these agencies but no one technically above them. You had the director of the CIA given these community management responsibilities, but generally the director of the CIA was focused on the CIA and neglecting the other parts of the community. So there wasn’t this synthesis across the agencies.
After 9/11 and the Iraq WMD fiasco, Congress decided to move ahead with one idea that had floated around for some time: a director of national intelligence who would be above the rest of the intelligence community’s 15 independent agencies and ensure they’re cooperating, ensure that we’re not missing alternative perspectives or connecting the dots as in 9/11. But also to serve as the president’s senior intelligence advisor – which was baked in from the beginning, but is a problem when the director of the CIA also thinks of themselves as the president’s senior intelligence advisor.
It was a little bit of a problem from the beginning where you had an individual who didn’t have much of an organization underneath him, and the people that supposedly worked for him were all answerable in their careers to someone else. For most of its history, the DNI has just been thought of as ineffective. At the beginning of the administration, it’s actually mentioned in the Haberman-Swann book that the selection of Tulsi Gabbard was surrounded by the idea, “Well, she’s got some ideas, but how much harm can she do? It’s the DNI after all.” That was literally what the president said.
I would have agreed for most of the last couple decades. There have been various reform proposals to put more meat on the bones of the DNI, but it basically wasn’t thought of as a threat. Unfortunately, under this administration, it has been weaponized. Whether we’re talking about Tulsi Gabbard’s repeated use of selective declassification – which is a power that she has – in order to reveal information that would specifically hurt the president’s political enemies or provide some narrative that he wants to hear, or her getting involved in law enforcement matters down in Georgia, which is not a responsibility of the DNI.
Separately, at the same time, the DNI has accumulated some bureaucracies which again were not malicious but were thought of as somewhat redundant. So you have the NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center, designed to get FBI and CIA to talk to each other. But FBI and CIA already were working together and had the information and assets to prosecute counterterrorism. So again, what is this institution about? There’s also a National Counterintelligence Center, which suffers from the same problem where both CIA, FBI, and other agencies are responsible for the same mission and they’re the door kickers. So you’ve had an organization that’s been adrift looking for a cause since 9/11, perhaps getting too big, and a director who has all of these authorities that they can use maliciously. It was like a loaded gun waiting on the table. And here we are with Tulsi Gabbard, and then Bill Poulte following in her wake, and now Clayton. In each of these cases, we’re not seeing any evidence that the DNI is going to stand up for the intelligence community, the workforce, and serve the broader interests of the United States rather than just the person of Donald Trump.
18:34 – Bree Fram
So what should the role of the DNI be in your opinion? How does it either serve as a gatekeeper, as a policy, as an organize, train, and equip function for the intelligence community? Where should it be, or have we moved beyond that kind of need for this coordinating function at that level?
18:56 – Julia Curlee
I think there’s probably a need for a coordinator role, which was the one thing that CIA really couldn’t do on its own, and what led to a lot of resentment of CIA for advancing its primacy in the intelligence community. But much of else of what the DNI does probably could be done by someone else. If you look at important functions like the President’s Daily Brief, CIA could probably run that. With proper oversight would incorporate other agencies’ information. CIA is, according to public reporting, already producing about 80 to 90% of what goes in the book. Most of the briefers are from CIA. They could probably take that responsibility on.
The NIC, the National Intelligence Council, also produces NIEs – the now famous 2020 election assessments – also could be taken in by CIA. People could rotate in from other agencies on joint duty assignments, so you have that interagency flavor, but you don’t necessarily need it to be in a different agency. But there are other things that the DNI does that probably makes sense to be the responsibility of someone – not someone with authorities and perhaps idle hands leading them to taking actions like what Tulsi Gabbard and Poulty have done.
I think there is a need for a considered look at this problem. It’s one of the things I’m working on now that I’m out of government: trying to think about how to right-size the DNI in the future. But one thing I would just want to say is that Poulty and Tulsi have also been doing this, but the mass layoffs, the mass firings of DNI officers seemingly with no explanation of why other than “they’re the deep state enemy within” or “the DNI should be smaller” – I thought that as being the custodian of the government, you’d want to put some time and thought into a zero-based review of its functions, who is needed and who is not. I don’t know how to remind people, but we’re in the middle of a war with Iran. And there were potentially cyber attacks on the United States that affected water treatment in several American states. One of the agencies that looks at foreign terrorist activity in the U.S. is the NCTC, which is under the gun and potentially being purged. So other than providing a supply of people to be ritualistically, performatively fired to create content on the internet, I don’t know what the goal is.
I’m all in favor of reducing the DNI. Reasonable people can disagree. I hope more thought is put into this. But what this administration has done with the DNI is to weaponize it and turn it into some sort of tool to be used for performance art in the media at the expense of really hardworking people.
22:06 – Bree Fram
I do want to get into that a little bit further, and the cost of ever offering a dissenting view, which has become very clear – you’re gone in this administration. But before we talk about that in a broader picture, put your other hat on. You worked on the National Security Council, and that, if we extend this coordination function for national security beyond just the intelligence community, was designed to do coordination among all aspects of government to make sure that the president was capable of making well-informed decisions, that we get all the perspectives possible. And now, of course, it doesn’t seem like any perspective is needed on anything. But I want to quote a phrase that you wrote in an article that said, “The breakdown of the NSC’s coordination function may be precisely what the president and his advisors want, but it’s produced serious miscalculations from ill-conceived tariffs to the catastrophic planning failures in the run-up to the war with Iran.” Probably most listeners of this podcast would say, “Yeah, of course, that is exactly what it has done.” Tell me how a healthy NSC does that coordination function and helps prevent catastrophic decision-making.
23:33 – Julia Curlee
Much like the DNI, there are many opinions on what the best form of an NSC is. The Biden administration in which I served came under criticism for being overly centralized, bureaucratic, too many meetings, too much White House control, not enough deference to departments and agencies. The Obama administration suffered from the same critique. But we have now experienced the alternative, which is effectively an NSC that has been neutered and not functional at all.
Just to give you more mechanics on how the NSC works, I’ll do a very brief overview. At the very top of the NSC would be the actual National Security Council chaired by the president in the Situation Room. Below them could be a Principals Committee without the president, sometimes including the vice president, which would be the heads of departments and agencies – the Secretary of State, Defense, CIA, the DNI. They would be the key, really the highest non-presidential decision-making body. Below them, a Deputies Committee, which is where the real work of developing options to tee up for the decision maker happens – these are the deputy director of the CIA, the deputy secretary of state, and so on. And then below them you have assistant secretary level work, which is where the real expertise resides.
Above that level, individuals have their days scheduled in 15-minute increments. They don’t have time to read a 10-page report on the state of the war in Iran. They have people for that. They don’t need to do that because they have whole staffs of experts who have devoted their lives to becoming the best Iran maritime expert. If you effectively decapitate the NSC, which is what happened – on day three of the administration, sending 160 career staffers home with no replacements in place – you rip the wiring out of the system. It immediately prevents a normal cadence of assistant secretary-level meetings from happening. You get these deputies and above meetings, which, if you saw the SignalGate fiasco where they had been using Signal to run high-level policy meetings, you’ll find how amateurish it was, how these individuals didn’t really understand the options at hand or the background of the case.
We have a system designed to prevent that. But this administration effectively cut off its own hands, plucked out its own eyes. The president can want things. The president can have urges, but that doesn’t mean they will be done or done well. This administration is acting as if it is not in charge of the world’s largest corporation. It’s not acting as if it’s responsible for the results and performance of the most complex organization on the planet, the U.S. government. It’s acting as if the words coming out of the president don’t need expert advice, don’t need a National Security Council, don’t need a coordinated intelligence community because he doesn’t need any additional information. But that can’t possibly be true – that he is the world expert on the implementation of oil sanctions on Iran. He hasn’t spent a career studying that.
The predictable result of all of that is both bad decisions, and then when those decisions are made, they can’t even implement them effectively. That’s why I brought up the case of the war in Iran, where despite decades of public war games that talked about how the Iranians would close the Strait of Hormuz, that decapitating the Iranian leadership would not lead to collapse, and how the Iranians would hit back, including potentially in the United States, somehow none of those considerations made it up to the top – which any functional NSC structure would have done. What we’re seeing here is by design, but the catastrophic results were predictable.
28:02 – Bree Fram
The “by design” has been clear in my own experience. When we were talking about the Golden Dome Missile Shield and how that was going to be implemented, when initial ideas out of the administration showed up, my comment as an engineer on these things was: this is the least technologically feasible, highest cost way of accomplishing this mission. When I tried to raise that point to get it to the political appointees, one of my bosses basically just said, “We can’t tell them that because the only thing they’re willing to hear is yes.” My understanding is that was what was happening everywhere at the political appointee level. Dissent was not a consideration. In a healthy National Security Council, or at any lower level, I’m guessing you saw dissent that was valuable. Perhaps without getting into specifics, can you talk about how dissent and different perspectives come together in making better outcomes?
29:07 – Julia Curlee
The intelligence community does not exist to tell the president what he wants to hear. It exists to describe the world as it is and what is likely to happen next. If by “dissent” we mean presenting a version of events that he doesn’t like, the intelligence community does that every day. We had a joke among analysts that the only consistent analytic bias of a CIA officer is your policy is going to fail and there’s nothing you can do about it. That is in the bloodstream of an organization that chisels on the wall the idea that the truth will set you free, that you speak truth to power.
But what has happened is when dissent has arrived. I’ll use the case of the Tren de Aragua assessment – this Venezuelan street gang, prison gang that the administration wanted to designate as a terrorist organization. I was the acting senior director on day one of the administration. When Stephen Miller wanted an assessment that said the very thing that would be the predicate for invoking the terrorism authorities or the Alien Enemies Act, which would open up another basket of authorities for deportations, I tasked it to the National Intelligence Council, who dutifully did the assessment. When the word came back that no, in fact, the street gang wasn’t directed to invade the United States, it’s a street gang, the head of the NIC was fired along with his deputy. They both had stood up for the values of our organization – speaking truth to power – and they were fired for it.
This has happened again and again. Whether it was that case or the firing of the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency for rightly claiming in public that the Iranian nuclear program had not been dissolved or destroyed in the first wave of attacks – which subsequently the administration had to admit as it went to war a second time for the same purpose – it has taught analysts across the community that any form of dissent, even dissent a decade ago, if you wrote one of the Russia assessments, can be held against you. We’ve seen with this administration a type of politicization which I think hasn’t been seen in the U.S. since the McCarthy era. It is driving out a generation of officers who want to serve their country but do not want to be part of the president’s political agenda.
31:31 – Bree Fram
There is so much there that we could dive into in another episode about the brain drain we’re seeing, the generational work to rebuild trust and capability that is inevitably going to have to follow this administration. But because we don’t have terribly much time, I want to get into just one more topic on the rules-based order that this country used to operate in. Does something like that still exist within our relationships to organizations like NATO or the value of the alliances that we have as we careen from one presidential whim or grievance to another? How do our friends and allies – or our friends who may no longer be or may no longer want to be our friends – see this kind of behavior, these wild swings of policy? And do we still have an opportunity to lead in this environment?
32:53 – Julia Curlee
The international rules-based order – by which I mean the institutions, the alliances that we built after we won World War II – were designed with America’s national interest in mind, of cementing our primacy around the world. And they worked for decades and ensured American commerce had access to countries around the world. We were the reserve currency of the world. We could effectively borrow unlimited money. All of that has been based on U.S. primacy, alliances, military power, and offering security to our allies and partners by falling under that umbrella.
This administration has decided that all of that doesn’t matter, that allies and partners are freeloaders, and they have effectively shredded several of our key alliances. NATO still exists. Article V still exists. But does anyone believe that if Estonia were invaded, Donald Trump would be interested in committing American forces? It has been a tremendous blow to our alliances.
I’ll put it in a couple specifics. If you are a foreign government deciding whether to share valuable intelligence with the United States, but you believe that the U.S. intelligence community has been politicized or that the White House is going to plop your information on the White House website because it serves a political end, you’re not going to give us information. If you’re a source deciding whether to work with the United States, and the White House might plop your secret information that you risked your lives to deliver, you’re not going to give that information. There is so much beyond there – this idea that soft power of the United States is some airy-fairy thing, but the power of the United States is built on our attractiveness.
Even in the context of this administration, I’ll put it in purely their terms. It was a presidential priority at the beginning of the administration to ensure access to critical minerals – key elements going into advanced weapons systems and the U.S. economy. What did they do in the opening part of the administration? They put into a woodchipper USAID, which was the primary source of U.S. influence prying open markets in the very countries that were the critical minerals providers. When you hurt an ally or partner and then you turn around and make demands of them, they seem to be a little less interested.
In the Iran case, where we launched a war of choice which we couldn’t finish, midway through the conflict we started berating our allies for not jumping in to provide us with capabilities like minesweepers that we needed. I traveled in France earlier this year and the farmers were not planting their spring crop. They couldn’t afford the gas because they were paying double of what they would normally pay. It would not be economically profitable. In the local context, you have French farmers who can’t put in their crops watching local news telling them precisely who is at fault – the United States launched a war of choice without talking to our countries or considering our interests.
This is replicating itself all around the world, whether it is basing rights in East Asia or the future of the NATO alliance. Countries are going their own way. When a new administration comes in, God willing, and is trying to put these things back together, the damage has been done because our allies and partners will know that we’re always going to be four years away from potentially doing a hard turn toward isolationism and tearing up the agreements that we worked out with them. We’re going to have to do some serious thinking about what a future American foreign policy looks like because it’s just not going back to where it was because of the damage of this administration.
37:07 – Bree Fram
Getting away from something that goes back to the post-World War II era – it was our enlightened self-interest to help others because they then wanted to help us and we all benefited from it. Where we’ve now transitioned to this much more naked power, running a country like a crime family that has a demand to say, “Give me something or else.” With that falling apart and with this reluctance of our allies to support us – whether that is from a simple intelligence product, basing access, more long and durable partnership – who wins in all of this? Who is being empowered to act around the globe?
37:58 – Julia Curlee
At the time that the United States is tearing up its own alliances, we’re seeing our adversaries working together closer than ever before. You have North Korea sending support to help the Russians fight in Ukraine. You’ve got the Iranians providing Shahed drones, which are one of the main weapons that are hurting the Ukrainians, now being used against us in the Gulf. You have Chinese weapons being sold to the Iranians. All of our main adversaries are now working together on a closer basis, while meanwhile we’re tearing up our own alliances.
I don’t want to get too far ahead of it – there are obvious major differences between this type of transactional behavior between them – but we’re going the wrong direction. This administration, in its national security strategy, has no understanding of who America’s adversaries actually are. They’ve taken out Russia, they’ve marginalized China – everything is about some deal making that they can do, and then they’ve elevated domestic groups as the real enemy within, doing our enemies’ work for us. It’s been really disheartening to watch, and I think it’s just a natural consequence of both the president’s desires to not be corrected when he’s wrong and the lack of coordination across the U.S. government that would have elevated these concerns as decisions were being made.
In the first Trump administration, that process was largely followed. So it didn’t have to be like this. It’s going to be a long two and a half more years to get through it unless the administration fundamentally changes how it makes decisions – and you see no evidence that they’re going to.
39:36 – Bree Fram
I think what we are starting to see is countries and leaders around the world stopping even responding to us or to the latest outburst of the president, saying it’ll be different two days later. To close out, I do want to touch on some of this with Iran. We are constantly in this back and forth where we are saying one thing, the Iranians are saying another, and there’s no chance to even get back to the status quo ante. Is there any other out that you see that is different than a lose-lose proposition? Or have we basically given up the opportunity to even get back to what was and create the conditions for prosperity in the Middle East?
40:31 – Julia Curlee
After the Iraq War, I really didn’t think I would see a strategic blunder that the United States would commit, especially in the Middle East, that would compete with that terrible decision to invade. I don’t see a good way out.
The Iranians have taken blow after blow after blow. They have suffered tremendously. The country is in ruins, but this is a regime fighting for its survival. There are millions of people in the Iranian government who are part of the regime, security forces, whose entire lives are caught up in the survival of the regime. An air campaign from above is not going to lead to the kind of outcomes that the president has stated.
On the other side, the U.S. war aims have shifted several times over the course of the conflict, depending on the whims of the president’s Twitter finger. Whether it is, “Well, we’re just going to get a better deal on the nuclear negotiations” – well, no, actually we want regime change. And then at the memorandum of understanding, which has now fallen apart, we were offering them a better deal than they had before the conflict. I don’t know what it’s called when you end up with a worse deal than when you started the war. I think it’s called losing.
The United States is in no position now – the greatest Navy on earth is in no position to ensure the security of transit through the Strait of Hormuz. You have the Defense Department people emailing around to servicemen asking for inputs: “Does anyone have any creative ideas of how we’re going to inflict pain on the Iranians?” And I read this and I’m like, God, if only there was some sort of council that would discuss national security and be informed by the latest intelligence and experts who might be able to inform a good policy. God, I don’t know what even you would call such a thing. Instead, it’s amateur hour.
Between that and sending the president’s son-in-law and real estate developers to deal with hardened revolutionaries, or trying to negotiate with a supreme leader whose dad we killed, I just don’t see the way out. The Iranians are famous for seeing an American president in political trouble – which this president has been since the moment he launched this war – facing midterm elections in November. I can’t imagine what incentive they have to give him a political gift to wind up this conflict when all they need to do is just not come to the table. I expect them to basically just wait us out and watch us as we give them more and more as the political calculations of the White House intensify.
43:16 – Bree Fram
I never thought I would live in a world where people are sharing Iranian propaganda on social media and we’re all going, “Well, that’s actually really good. Nice use of Legos, Iran.” It is crazy to think that that’s the position we’re in – where we’re just hopeful for a less bad outcome, because there is no good outcome that we can foresee.
When this outcome shows up, I’d love to talk to you more about it because there is so much that we have to cover on the continuing role of the intelligence coordination function, putting good people in place, putting people who live up to their oaths.
Julia Curlee, thank you for joining us on this episode of the Steady State Sentinel. For our listeners out there, we hope that this episode gave you something to think about, and let us know what resonated with you or what questions it raised. You can find us on Substack and across all social media. Your feedback matters and helps us improve this product. Until next time, thank you for listening. I’m Bree Fram, Still Standing Watch.
44:26 – Julia Curlee
Thanks, Bree.