This is The Reason Interview with Nicklespie. Thanks for listening today. I'm joined by Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, and one of my favorite foreign policy analysts, who is a clear-eyed critic of U.S. foreign policy in general. She's written a lot about grand strategy, and we're going to get to that,

the Middle East and the limits of American power.

We're going to start off by talking about Iran, and then we're going to talk about the major themes of her recent book, First Among Equals, U.S. foreign policy and a multipolar war as well.

Emma, thanks for talking to reason.

No, great to be back. Let's get right to it.

You know, at this point, we're over a month into the war with Iran or in Iran. What is your sense of

what the actual U.S. objective is for us in Iran and does it make sense?

You know, if we got all the way back to like day two or three of this war, there was this

big debate about what the U.S. objectives were. And I think even at the time, it was pretty

obvious that we didn't have clear objectives. And instead, what we had was this sort of big

basket of things the US could be trying to achieve everything from regime change to controlling

the nuclear program and sort of how we did in the war would depend how many of those we might get.

I think what has now become apparent is obviously we're not getting the most extreme version

of it. We're not getting

regime change. But the administration is still only dialed back what they want from the Iranians

a little bit. Lots of talk about nuclear questions, lots of talk about regional activity. And then,

of course, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which only became an issue after the war started.

Yeah. And I mean, there basically has never been a moment where the Strait of Hormuz, which only became an issue after the war started. Yeah. And I mean, there basically has never been a moment where the straight was, you know,

was closed off by Iran, right? I mean, I think there were like brief moments in the Iran-Iraq war,

but somehow the major calamity or the major talking point now is to reopen a Strait of Hormuz, which was

open before we attacked Iran.

That doesn't speak towards any kind of strategy, does it?

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