Farah Jan is an International Relations lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her Ph.D. from Rutgers University–New Brunswick in 2018. Her research focuses on interstate rivalries, nuclear proliferation, and the security politics of South Asia and the Middle East. Her doctoral dissertation, Adversarial Peace: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Nuclear Rivalries, examined how nuclear weapons shape strategic rivalries. She has published in academic and policy outlets including Foreign Policy, Arab News, Asharq Al-Awsat, Foreign Policy Journal, and Democracy & Security.

Gulan: In your recent article, you argue that while the United States achieved rapid military success in Iraq in 2003, the long-term political outcome proved far more complex and ultimately destabilizing.
Do you see the current confrontation with Iran following a similar trajectory, where short-term military gains risk obscuring the absence of a viable political endgame?

Dr. Farah Jan: The parallel I keep returning to is not tactical but political: in 2003, the United States achieved military dominance within three weeks and then spent two decades discovering that military dominance is not a political settlement. (My piece in the conversation elaborates on this) The same structural problem is now visible with Iran. Strikes can degrade enrichment infrastructure, kill commanders, and impose costs, but none of that answers the harder question of who governs Iran afterward, on what terms, and with what legitimacy. The Iraq War produced a government in Baghdad that, within a decade, was more aligned with Tehran than with Washington. That was not a failure of firepower; it was a failure of political imagination.

What worries me about the current trajectory is the same absence of a theory of the day after. Regime change is invoked implicitly without being planned explicitly. Coercive diplomacy is pursued without a clear off-ramp. In my recent piece on war termination (in Responsible Statecraft), I argue that ending a war requires at least four actors - the US, Israel, Iran, and the Gulf states - to converge on an acceptable outcome, and right now they are not converging. Short-term military gains are real. But without a political endgame, they become the beginning of a longer problem, not the end of a shorter one.

Gulan: One of the central critiques of the Iraq War has been the lack of a clear post-war strategy.
In your view, have policymakers internalized these lessons, or are we witnessing a repetition of similar strategic miscalculations in the current regional escalation?

Dr. Farah Jan: Institutionally, yes. Rhetorically, yes. Operationally, the evidence is mixed. You hear the right phrases - no boots on the ground, limited objectives, diplomatic track in parallel -and those reflect lessons learned. What has not been learned is humility about escalation dynamics. Iraq taught us that you can control the first move and almost nothing after it. The adversary adapts, proxies activate, regional states hedge, and the conflict expands into spaces the original plan never accounted for.

The specific miscalculation I see being repeated is the assumption that limited strikes produce limited consequences. That assumption held in some Cold War cases and it does not hold in the Middle East in 2026. Iran has spent twenty years building an asymmetric response architecture across Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria precisely because it learned its own lessons from watching Saddam in 2003. So when we strike, we are not striking a single state - we are triggering a network. The 2003 lesson was that the war you plan is not the war you get. I am not confident that lesson has made it from the seminar room into the situation room.

Gulan: Iraq today occupies a highly sensitive position within the regional balance of power, particularly given its political ties, internal dynamics, and proximity to Iran.
How do you assess Iraq’s vulnerability in the current conflict, and to what extent could it once again become a central arena for broader regional confrontation?

Dr. Farah Jan: Iraq is the most exposed state in the region and, paradoxically, the least sovereign over its own exposure. Its geography places it between the two principal belligerents. Its politics are influenced by Iranian-aligned factions and, simultaneously, dependent on American security assistance and economic lifelines - the dollar clearing arrangement, the energy waivers, the ongoing training mission. It cannot pick a side without fracturing internally, and it cannot stay neutral without being used by both.

What makes this moment more dangerous than 2006 or 2014 is that Iraq’s political system has less slack in it. The power sharing muhasaa system is under strain, the Shia house is divided, Sunni reintegration remains incomplete, and the Kurdistan Region has its own unresolved tensions with Baghdad. Into that fragile arrangement you are now injecting an active US-Iran military exchange, with militia attacks on US positions and potential Iranian use of Iraqi territory as a staging ground. The risk is not a single catastrophic event - it is the cumulative erosion of an already thin state capacity. Iraq does not need to be invaded to be destabilized. It just needs to be squeezed from both directions for long enough, and that squeeze has already begun.

Gulan: The Kurdistan Region of Iraq occupies a unique position within the country’s political and security landscape, maintaining its own institutions while also navigating relations with both Baghdad and regional powers.
In the context of the current escalation involving Iran and the United States, how do you assess the Kurdistan Region’s strategic position, and to what extent does it face distinct risks compared to the rest of Iraq?

Dr. Farah Jan: The Kurdistan Region sits in a genuinely unusual strategic position, and its risks diverge from the rest of Iraq in a few specific ways. First, it hosts Western military and intelligence infrastructure - Erbil has been a hub for the anti-ISIS coalition and remains a platform for regional operations. That makes it a visible target in a way that Basra or Najaf is not. Iranian missile strikes were messages about what the KRG’s alignment costs.

Second, the KRG’s economy is acutely vulnerable. The pipeline dispute with Baghdad, the unresolved budget transfers, and dependence on oil revenues that move through contested infrastructure mean that any regional escalation that disrupts energy flows hits Erbil and Sulaymaniyah faster than it hits the federal government. Third, the region faces a two-front pressure, from Iran directly, and from Iranian-aligned factions inside Iraq who view KRG autonomy as a lever worth pulling.

What the KRG has going for it is a degree of institutional coherence that the rest of the country lacks, and relationships with Washington, Ankara, and European capitals that give it diplomatic bandwidth disproportionate to its size, but coherence is not invulnerability. In a prolonged US-Iran confrontation, the Kurdistan Region risks becoming a pressure valve that both sides use, and that is a dangerous position for any actor to occupy.

Gulan: Your work highlights the role of alliances and rivalries in shaping regional security.
In the aftermath of the Iraq War, Iran significantly expanded its influence within Iraq and the wider region.
Do you see the current conflict as reinforcing Iran’s regional position, or potentially exposing the limits of its influence?

Dr. Farah Jan: Both, and the tension between the two is the interesting part. In the short term, conflict has a rallying effect. External pressure consolidates a regime that was facing genuine domestic dissent, mobilizes the IRGC’s institutional centrality, and validates the forward-defense doctrine Tehran has spent two decades building. The proxy network in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen gets activated, which looks like strength.

But look at the same picture on a two-year horizon and the limits become visible. Hezbollah has been degraded in ways that are not easily reversed. Assad is gone. The Houthis remain capable but are not a substitute for the Levantine depth Iran has lost. Iran is not weaker than it was; it is differently structured. Its influence now rests on nuclear ambiguity and missile coercion rather than the proxy architecture that defined the 2010s - a shift from one kind of leverage to a narrower and more dangerous kind.

But it would be a mistake to read Iran’s losses as American gains. The same conflict that degraded Hezbollah has also accelerated Gulf hedging, produced the Saudi-Pakistan mutual defense agreement, and eroded confidence in American security guarantees in ways that will outlast this administration. Gulf states are shopping - for nuclear partners, for alternative security arrangements, for insurance against an American umbrella they no longer fully trust. What is actually happening is that both patrons are weaker and the region is becoming more multipolar. That is not a transformation in Tehran’s favor, but it is not one in Washington’s either. The beneficiaries are middle powers - Riyadh, Ankara, Islamabad, Abu Dhabi - who now have room to hedge, and external actors like China and Russia who inherit a more multipolar region without having to pay for it.

Gulan: Your research on nuclear rivalries examines how nuclear capabilities shape strategic behavior between adversaries.
In the context of rising tensions involving Iran, how do nuclear considerations influence the decision-making of regional and global actors, and do they act more as a deterrent or as a source of escalation?

Dr. Farah Jan: Nuclear weapons do both things the question asks about - they deter and they escalate - and the ratio depends on whether possession is established or contested. Established nuclear powers, as we see with India and Pakistan, generate what the literature calls the stability-instability paradox: nuclear weapons make large wars less likely while making smaller, sub-threshold conflicts more frequent. That is the threshold-war dynamic I have written about (conversation article in June 2025).

Iran is in a different and more dangerous category. It is a threshold state, not a nuclear state, and threshold states produce the worst of both worlds. Adversaries have an incentive to strike before the threshold is crossed, which creates preventive-war pressures. The threshold state has an incentive to sprint, which creates breakout pressures. And neither side has the stabilizing effect of mutual vulnerability that actually consolidated deterrence on the subcontinent. So nuclear considerations in the current moment are primarily escalatory, not stabilizing - they are the reason the conflict is happening now rather than later.

The broader point is about extended deterrence. When Gulf states and others stop believing the American umbrella covers them reliably, they start shopping - for nuclear partners, for indigenous capability, for alternative security arrangements. The Saudi-Pakistan defense agreement is one symptom. We should expect more.

Gulan: The current conflict has also highlighted shifting alliances and strategic alignments across the region and beyond.
Looking ahead, what do you see as the most likely long-term consequences of this escalation for Iraq and the broader Middle East, and are there realistic pathways to avoid repeating the kind of prolonged instability that followed the 2003 Iraq War?

Dr. Farah Jan: The most likely long-term consequence, if current trajectories hold, is a Middle East with more nuclear aspirants, weaker state capacity in the Levant, and a regional security architecture no longer anchored by the United States. That last point deserves to be stated plainly: what we are watching is not just Iran’s network being degraded, it is the unwinding of an American-led order that has defined the region since 1991. The US is losing its position as the indispensable security provider - not because it has been defeated, but because its allies have concluded that its guarantees are conditional, its attention is elsewhere, and its domestic politics make long-term commitments unreliable. The Saudi-Pakistan mutual defense agreement is the clearest signal of that shift, and there will be more.

What replaces a unipolar security order is a multipolar one, and multipolarity in a geography this tightly packed - with this many unresolved territorial disputes, sectarian fault lines, and nuclear thresholds - tends to be more conflict-prone, not less. Iraq specifically faces the risk of becoming what Lebanon became after 1982: a territory where other states fight their wars. The difference is that Iraq in 2026 has oil, borders with four regional powers, and a political system penetrated by several of them.

Are there realistic off-ramps? Yes, but they require choices that are currently politically difficult in every relevant capital. A durable arrangement would need, at minimum, a verifiable nuclear agreement with Iran that both Washington and Tel Aviv can live with, a regional security dialogue that actually includes Tehran rather than isolating it, and a reconstituted Iraqi sovereignty framework that reduces the country’s vulnerability to being used as a proxy battlefield. It would also require Washington to decide whether it wants to reanchor the regional order or manage its gradual exit, because the current posture, which is neither, is the one most likely to produce the worst outcomes for everyone, including the United States.