Episode Details

Another month, another war — this one looking like a complete c*******k. I spoke again with my go-to military historian, who among other things has thoughts about shoes. Here’s a transcript:

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TRANSCRIPT: Paul Krugman in Conversation with Phillips O’Brien

(recorded 3/12/26)

Paul Krugman: Paul Krugman here with another conversation with my favorite military historian/expert, Phillips O’Brien. We do this every time there’s a new war, which means I guess we’re gonna be having a lot of them at the rate we’ve been going.

Phillips O’Brien: Yeah, I’ll see you when he attacks Cuba, right? That’s the next one. So we have Iran now, and then Cuba in a few weeks, I think.

Krugman: I’m not sure we have the resources for Cuba, but yeah. So okay. We’re recording this a bit less than two weeks into this new war with Iran. There are a couple of specific areas I wanna talk about, but first, do you have anything to say that might be a useful starting point?

O’Brien: I don’t think they know what they’re doing. And I don’t think that they had a plan. He basically did what megalomaniac leaders do. They underestimate their enemy and they think they will do this quickly. It’s what Putin did to Ukraine in 2022. “We will just march in, we’ll do what we want. We have this great military.” He was boasting about American military power, and I think he just thought this would be relatively straightforward. He liked to refer to the Venezuela model and I think he thought, ‘okay, what I’m gonna do is blow up the leadership, kill the leadership, and then I’ll get a new leadership that will be much more compliant and do what I want. I don’t wanna actually bring any kind of freedom or democracy to the Iranian people.’ Because, by the way, he’s talking about a leader for the next five to 10 years. So he is actually talking about putting another authoritarian in place. And he thought it would happen, a little bit harder than Venezuela it seems, but not much harder. And he completely underestimated what he was taking on. And what he’s done is caught himself without a strategic plan. They never thought through the second and third order effects, they were nowhere down wondering what would happen if the Strait of Hormuz was cut and they couldn’t get anything out of the Gulf. And I think they’re just making it up now as they go along.

Krugman: Yeah. That’s what we’re all seeing. I wanna come back to that a bit, but, your specialty has been air power, sea power, and strategically how wars are fought that way. And in a way the United States came in with “the O’Brien Supremacy.” We have vastly more, in normal terms or in historic terms, complete air superiority. We have the Navy but actually, let’s talk first about air power. In some ways it seems more effective. It can do big things.

O’Brien: Well, the United States and Israel can blow up anything they want in Iran. Or practically anything they want in Iran. They can’t get to the deep nuclear stuff, or at least they don’t. They’re not sure if they can get to it, but otherwise they could blow up any target on the ground they want to blow up and there’s nothing the Iranians can do about it. Their air defenses, from what we can tell, have mostly been neutralized.

The issue with air power is, it’s great for blowing things up if you have air supremacy, but it’s not great for putting anything else in its place. And this is what they hadn’t worked out. They thought, ‘Okay, we’ll blow things up and something we want will come along and start ruling Iran in a way that we’d like.’ They also didn’t understand that Iran has air power. Not to defend itself, but to strike back. So they totally missed