Renowned geopolitics expert Stephen Kotkin says the Trump administration’s strikes on Iran are the latest chapter in a 47-year declared war — not its cause — but warns that destroying Iranian military capability without cultivating a credible political alternative risks prolonging, not ending, the conflict.

Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, argues the Iranian regime is hollow and despised by 80 million of its own 90 million citizens, but that the 10 per cent who control the guns have nowhere to defect to and no incentive to stop fighting. Regime alteration — not regime change — may be the more realistic near-term outcome, as it was in Venezuela.

“There’s one geopolitical risk that’s much larger and unpriceable, that’s this China war, and that would transform all the things that we’re not happy about and where civilians are suffering, and there’s violence affecting markets, but in ways that markets can manage that would transform everything, including people’s portfolios.”

The conversation also covers AI-enhanced cyber vulnerabilities to critical infrastructure, the strategic logic behind the Greenland issue, and why China and Russia have left Iran to face this conflict alone.