Eliot Cohen, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, is a military historian and the founder of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Cohen has written numerous books on military history and strategy, but is perhaps best known for his passionate support of the American invasion of Iraq, which he argued in favor of extensively, both in the late nineteen-nineties, when he was a member of the Project for the New American Century think tank, along with Bill Kristol, John Bolton, and Paul Wolfowitz, and after the 9/11 attacks. In the later years of the George W. Bush Administration, Cohen served in the State Department under Condoleezza Rice. Since then, he has become a so-called Never Trump conservative, regularly attacking the President while continuing to argue for a hawkish foreign policy.
Before President Donald Trump’s order to strike Iran last weekend, Cohen published a piece in The Atlantic pushing for American involvement, and applauding the fact that Trump seemed to be moving toward a military attack. “Much as it may pain his critics to admit it, in this matter he is acting, if not conventionally, then like a statesman of a distinctively Trumpian stamp,” Cohen wrote. Cohen followed this piece with another article, which ran in The Atlantic on Sunday, after the strike, titled “Trump Got This One Right.” He explained, “Trump got this one right, doing what his predecessors lacked the intestinal fortitude (or, to be fair, the promising opportunity) to do. He spoke with the brutal clarity needed in dealing with a cruel and dangerous regime.”
I recently spoke by phone with Cohen about his case for American military action, and his history of support for a proactive American role in the Middle East. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed his skepticism about an American intelligence assessment saying that Trump’s strike only set the Iranian nuclear program back by a matter of months, his post-October 7th trip to the Gaza Strip, and the lessons he did and didn’t take from the war in Iraq.
What have you made of how Trump has handled Iran over the past week, from the strike to the push for a ceasefire?
I was in favor of the strike, and I give him credit. As you know, I’ve been about as ferocious a critic of him as one can be. I think I may have been the original Never Trumper, but I think on this one he did the right thing, because this has been a problem brewing for a very long time, and no Administration, including the one I was part of, was really able to deal with it. He seized an opportunity. In terms of damage assessments, my feeling about that, for a whole bunch of reasons, is that it is way too early to tell. But the strike was actually done remarkably well. Trump being Trump, he immediately claimed credit for obliterating the nuclear program. We don’t know that. And he has claimed credit for bringing peace, which I very much doubt. But many of us, including close friends, loathe the guy, and it’s made it impossible for them to recognize a good decision and a desirable outcome.
You said that other Administrations hadn’t been able to “deal with” this problem. Do you feel like Trump has dealt with the problem?
I think he’s done much more than other Administrations. We don’t know how much damage has been done by the American strikes, but there was damage done by the Israelis in their covert action, their air strikes, and the American strikes. What I think people have missed is that he has really set a precedent for the use of American military power to go after the Iranian nuclear program. It’s really important. We have tried sanctions and negotiations, and they may have, to some extent, slowed the program, but I think it’s very clear that the Iranians were pressing on.
What did you make of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence, saying in March that the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, had not authorized going forward with producing a bomb, and that American spy agencies agreed with that conclusion?
What I make of it is the same thing that I made of her statements that Bashar al-Assad was not such a bad guy. She’s a nut case who has no particular grasp on the realities of the situation. She is one of a number of people who never should have been appointed to that position. If [C.I.A. director] John Ratcliffe had said that, I would have taken it more seriously, because he’s not a nut case.
We don’t have any reason to believe that she was lying about what the American intelligence community broadly believed, correct?
We don’t have any reason to believe that she was [telling the truth]. And, by the way, the American intelligence community has a pretty mixed track record on this. Intelligence is always difficult. Secondly, on this one, they have an uneven record. Thirdly, the Israelis have had a much better record than we have and they’re motivated because the Iranians want to exterminate them. So between the weirdness and unreliability of Tulsi Gabbard on the one hand and our intelligence community’s record on the other, I don’t take anything she says seriously.
I was only saying that we don’t have any reason to think that the intelligence community had reached a different conclusion.
We don’t know whether she was accurately rendering what people were saying. We don’t know that it was actually a consensus position. [On June 19th, the Times reported that it remains the consensus position of the intelligence community that Iran has not yet decided whether to pursue the manufacture of nuclear bombs; senior officials also told the newspaper that Iran was likely to move toward it if the United States attacked.] It would be a big mistake to think that the top-level judgments are not made with an eye to what you think the political leadership may do that you like or dislike. That was the experience I had in government. So, you know, the intelligence world is murky. It’s a murky world. There’s some outstanding people there and there are other people who have political views and act on them.
You just said that you weren’t sure how much damage was done by the American strikes on Saturday. You also wrote, on Sunday, “For some period—five years, maybe 10—Iran will not have a nuclear option.” Did you have a reason to use those numbers, or were you just speculating? The Times and other outlets recently reported, based on a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report, that the strike seems to have only set the program back by a “few months.”
That was a preliminary D.I.A. assessment which is not shared by the Israelis. If you look at the Israeli press, you’ll see that is not the Israeli view. [After Trump began an extraordinary attack on the media for reporting on the D.I.A. assessment, and defended his claim that the Iranian nuclear sites had been “obliterated,” Ratcliffe released an assessment saying that the American strikes had “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear program. The Times also reported, on Wednesday, that, according to U.S. government officials, “should Iran decide to move quickly to get a bomb, it is unlikely to use the facilities struck in the American attack but probably has much of the raw materials and know-how needed to continue.”]
I ran the Air Force’s study of the first Gulf War. And even like six months or a year later, we were still arguing about the bomb-damage assessments. It’s a very difficult task. So it is too soon to know exactly what the result of the Fordo strikes in particular were.