What will Iran look like in one year? A defensive nationalism helps hardliners.

Carl von Clausewitz told us, “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.” Friction is apparent one week into this war as military action is not translating directly into political control. Instead, forecasting Iran’s trajectory requires separating territorial survival from state capacity. The most probable outcome, as the U.S. intelligence community predicted, is a return to the status quo ante, but with an even more degraded state apparatus.