Reich Is Right About the Chaos. He Misses the Graveyard It’s Heading For.

Robert Reich knows a thing or two about how American power works. He served as Labour Secretary under Bill Clinton, has taught at Berkeley for decades, and has spent thirty years forensically dissecting the ways Washington fails ordinary people. When he writes that Trump has no endgame for Operation Epic Fury, he is worth listening to.

And he’s right. If anything, he understates the horror of Trump’s Iran folly. But Reich, writing from inside the American story, sees the domestic damage most clearly: broken promises on prices, border brutality, the ghost of LBJ. There is a larger and considerably grimmer picture his op-ed doesn’t quite reach. Let me try to fill in some gaps.

Everything That Wasn’t Tried First

Crikey’s Charlie Lewis, reporting Wednesday on the legal framing of this war, notes that there are myriad ways a nation can and must seek legitimacy before embarking on war, and the United States has done literally none of them. No UN Security Council resolution. No congressional authorisation. No declared imminent threat meeting the legal threshold of being “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means.”

There is no nuclear threat. The IAEA finds no evidence Iran is moving toward a nuclear weapon. Diplomacy, as recently as Thursday in Geneva, still had a pulse. On the Friday before the bombs fell, Oman’s foreign minister announced Iran had agreed to degrade its uranium stockpiles to unrefined levels. The next morning, the bombs fell anyway.

This is not a pre-emptive war. It is a preventive war, which is a different and legally indefensible thing. Iran posed no imminent threat to vital American interests. Richard Haass, former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department under Colin Powell, and twenty-year president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a man who built his career advising presidents on exactly these decisions, puts it plainly:

“This is a war of choice. The United States had other policy options available.”

Trump chose otherwise. And he chose without a plan.

The Man at the Controls

Reich describes Trump as “winging it,” which is generous. The CNN interview with Jake Tapper on Sunday reveals something closer to a dull, elderly and unwell man bluffing his way through a war briefing he hasn’t quite absorbed. Or napped through.

Asked about Iran’s succession plan after the US and its proxy, Israel, killed 49 of its senior leaders, Trump saw the problem this way: “We went down 49 Iranian leaders. We don’t know who’s leading the country now. They don’t know who’s leading. It’s a little like the unemployment line.”

This is the commander-in-chief describing the power vacuum his own war has created in a country of 93.2 million people, armed with ballistic missiles and a Revolutionary Guard that has just vowed the heaviest offensive in its history. Like the unemployment line? All evidence suggests Iran has contingency plans and a devolution of authority quite capable of leading the country in the event of losses to the top brass.

The resilience of the Iranian regime is rooted in a massive, multi-tiered security apparatus that integrates nearly one million individuals into the state’s survival strategy. At the core of this structure is the Artesh, a conventional military of 375,000 tasked with national defence, which provides a layer of institutional stability.

However, the “powerhouse” of the regime is the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC); with at least 125,000 members which functions as a state-within-a-state, wielding immense political influence and controlling a vast economic empire that includes construction, energy, and telecommunications. This economic control allows the regime to bypass international sanctions and fund its operations independently of the formal budget.

Supplementing these forces is the Basij, a paramilitary volunteer corps that can mobilise up to 450,000 members to infiltrate schools, factories, and neighbourhoods. By embedding these loyalists throughout the social and economic fabric of the country, the regime ensures that any internal dissent is met with immediate, localised suppression, keeping its power structure intact even under extreme domestic and international pressure. Surely his minders would have explained this to Trump?

Yet Trump is clearly surprised by the scale of Iran’s retaliation. He tells different outlets the war would last four weeks, then four to five weeks, then possibly “far longer.” He posts on Truth Social that munitions stockpiles have “never been higher or better,” one day after the Wall Street Journal reports that the US is racing to destroy Iran’s missile force before running out of interceptors. Reports today attest to his meeting with underwhelmed Raytheon, Lockheed and a series of other arms industry leaders who can’t believe the Trump administration is currently using a “stick” approach, as seen in the February 6, 2026, “America First Arms Transfer Strategy.”

This policy treats defence contractors less like partners and more like “underperforming utilities.” The President has threatened to sever ties with RTX and other primes if they do not cap executive pay and prioritise government contracts over investor returns.

Does Trump not know advanced systems like the Patriot or THAAD interceptors take 2 to 3 years from order to delivery due to specialised microchips and rocket motors?

Increasingly, team Trump is at war with information itself. His own cabinet cronies can’t keep the story straight. But best in show is the face of US diplomacy, Secretary of State, Marco Rubio who tells reporters the strikes were launched because Washington knew Iran would retaliate against American forces once Israel attacked, so the US struck first. A pre-emptive war to prevent retaliation for a war they were already starting?

Trump has contradicted Rubio directly during a meeting with Germany’s Chancellor, saying he “might’ve forced Israel’s hand.” Defence Secretary Hegseth insists this is “not a so-called regime change war.” Trump has openly and repeatedly called on the Iranian people to overthrow their government. CNN sources report the administration overstated Iran’s missile capabilities, citing intelligence assessments that don’t support the claims made at the State of the Union. The Defence Intelligence Agency’s own 2025 assessment said Iran could develop a missile capable of reaching the United States by 2035 at the earliest. It was presented to the American people as an imminent threat.

The Munitions Problem Nobody in Washington Wants to Discuss

Whilst no-one dare say this is an illegal war, there is another dimension of Trump’s war on Iran that deserves far more attention: the arithmetic of attrition.

Iran’s strategy is not primarily to win a conventional military exchange. It is to bleed its opponents dry. Every Iranian Shahed drone, a weapon costing roughly $20,000 to manufacture, requires a Patriot interceptor worth somewhere between $4 million and $15 million to destroy.

In the first 48 hours of the war, Iran fired more than 1,200 missiles and drones. The UAE alone intercepted over 650 Iranian projectiles in that period at a 92 per cent interception rate. As Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Centre, observed: tactical victory masks a costly strategic drain.

The Wall Street Journal reports, within days of the war’s opening that the US is racing to destroy Iran’s missile and drone capability before it runs out of interceptors. Middle East Eye confirms that the US is already stonewalling Gulf states’ requests to replenish their air defence stockpiles.

The Pentagon burned through more than $1 billion in munitions during one month of operations against the Houthis in the Red Sea, without achieving air superiority. Foreign Policy analysts were blunt: “The attackers do not want to find themselves trapped in an attritional slugfest, where they burn through hundreds of millions of dollars per day and exhaust their stocks of the most advanced interceptors.”

Iran knows this. Tehran is deliberately pursuing what analysts now call financial attrition, saturating air defences with cheap munitions to deplete expensive ones. Russia perfected this doctrine against Ukraine. Iran has studied the lesson with care.

High-end interceptors like THAAD take months to assemble, integrate and test. The FY25 defence budget funded exactly 18 Tomahawk missiles. The production line cannot keep pace with the consumption rate of a sustained regional war. Rubio himself acknowledged on Monday that Iran produces over 100 offensive missiles a month. The mathematics of this exchange do not favour Washington in a prolonged campaign.

Meanwhile, the concentration of US air defence interceptors in the Persian Gulf means fewer are available for Ukraine. Kyiv welcomed the strikes on Iranian military targets while watching its own air defences quietly deplete.

The “No Endgame” Problem Is Structurally Worse Than Reich Thinks

Tragically, the problem isn’t merely Trump’s innate capacity to turn crisis into catastrophe. It is that there may be no endgame available to anyone.

Brookings concludes that the Trump administration has “no clue and no plan” for what comes next, and warns the United States should prepare for Iran’s “full implosion, fragmentation, and the spread of a chaos that would make the aftermath of our misadventures in Iraq and Libya look like a picnic.”

Al Jazeera’s analysts surveyed those precedents: in every case, air power removed the head, and warlordism filled the vacuum. The World Bank’s own governance indicators collapsed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya after intervention and have not recovered.

Iran has over 90 million people, a three-thousand-year cultural identity, and a Revolutionary Guard built specifically to survive decapitation. The most likely near-term outcome, according to Responsible Statecraft and the Arab Centre DC, is military rule under the Revolutionary Guard, probably more dangerous and more paranoid than the theocracy it replaces. Venezuela in fatigues, not Czechoslovakia in 1989.

The political opposition in exile has no domestic security apparatus and no command structure. The IRGC, by its own leaked intelligence assessments submitted to the Supreme National Security Council, has killed somewhere between several thousand and possibly tens of thousands of its own citizens in the recent protests. You cannot bomb your way to democracy. This is the empirical record of every American regime-change war of the last twenty-five years.

What Canberra Isn’t Being Asked

In Australia, a question that Crikey’s Charlie Lewis raises deserves louder amplification. Anthony Albanese was among the first world leaders to endorse the war, his statement issued within three hours. France, Germany and Britain, in their joint response, were careful to note they did not participate and emphasised the need to protect civilians.

Increasingly acting the CIA asset, Albanese did not find that formulation necessary.

Penny Wong, asked whether Pine Gap played any role in targeting, gave the answer she always gives; “we never comment on that facility.” Intelligence experts describe Pine Gap not as a spy base but as a war-planning base. It was used to facilitate Afghanistan, Iraq, and every major American operation in the region since 1970.

The Greens’ senate leader, Larissa Waters, states the fact so studiously ignored by corporate media, a US fan-club: Labor has made Australia part of this war. The Sydney Peace Foundation notes that by hosting US military infrastructure of such critical strategic importance, we have already made the central Australian desert a target for any foe who keen to deliver a knock-out blow.

Given his eager support, can we expect the PM to pledge a bit of military help? Under laws amended by the Howard government in 2001 and never restored, the PM can take Australia to war on the basis of agreement between himself and Cabinet alone. Nobody in the national media is asking whether that authority is being used.

Reich Is Right About One Thing Above All

He’s right that Trump’s war may be his undoing. The three promises he was elected on are now comprehensively broken: prices are rising, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, and the man who said “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars” is presiding over the largest American military commitment to the Middle East since 2003, without a plan, without congressional authorisation, without allied consensus, and without the faintest coherent account of what winning looks like.

Reich prays it’s not also the undoing of America.

The brave Iranian people who marched under the banner of Woman, Life, Freedom deserve better than to be used as retroactive justification for a war launched in the dark, without their consultation, by a president who compares their leaderless country to an unemployment line.

The endgame question Reich asks about Washington deserves to be asked about Canberra too. Nobody is asking it yet.