Adam Grant

You know, I think that Senator Graham's argument is very persuasive among certain people in Washington.

And certainly U.S.

military planners believe that Iran responds to pressure, right?

If you look back to the killing of Iran's General Qasem Soleimani during the first Trump administration,

You know, there are a lot of folks that believe that Iran's provocative actions against the United States and its allies kind of really scaled back after that, that they respond to pressure.

Now, there is another school of thought that Iran absolutely will not buckle when under pressure.

part of the ethos that the United States is their top adversary, along with Israel, and that in the event of attack, people are gonna rally around that identity as the resistance force.

And that is a very powerful argument as well, because Iran has traditionally seen themselves as revolutionaries, as kind of a resistance against the United States and against Israel.

And now that they're under attack, the question is, would an escalating attack really force them to back away from that identity?

Or will it kind of have them double down?

So this is the most important question, and I'm so glad you asked it and asked it in that way, because really there are a lot of things that can happen once you start putting more and more skin in the game, as it were, by deploying ground forces.

You know, if there were a large strike that killed a large number of U.S.

troops, if Iran decides to go big in its retaliation and is successful, because I think they have tried to target U.S.

troops and have killed 13 and wounded more than 300.

So it's not as if there's no cost.

But so far, the United States has not seen the kind of major attack that some of these military planners really feared before the war began.

There was real concern that there could be a catastrophic strike on US bases or US personnel that could actually create a lot of political risk here and force the United States to double down or force US allies.

If it was a big strike on desalinization plants or major cities in the Gulf,

that you could really see this becoming an intensified war much more than it is right now.

And I'm Adam Grant.