| How RAND’s Russia strategy and Brookings’ Iran strategy were written into the wars that followed |
RAND Corporation is not an independent commentator sitting outside the American state. It is a federally funded research and development centre that has operated under standing contract to the US Army, the Air Force, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense since 1948, and its 2019 report on Russia, Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground, was commissioned directly by the Army and produced within RAND’s Arroyo Center, the Army’s own strategy research arm. Its lead author, James Dobbins, had been a sitting US Assistant Secretary of State before writing it. Brookings occupies the equivalent position on the Iran file. Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran was produced by the Saban Center’s senior staff, among them Martin Indyk, twice US Ambassador to Israel and a National Security Council official under Clinton, and several co-authors who moved through the CIA and State Department before and after the volume’s publication. These are not think tanks in the sense of detached academic institutes publishing for a general readership. They are the standing policy-planning apparatus of the American national security state, staffed by the same people who later occupy the offices that execute the options they write, and their published work functions as the first drafted layer of policy that is later adopted, refined, and operationalised through the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Pentagon. Reading their reports as forecasts written by outsiders with no bearing on what governments actually do misunderstands what these institutions are for. |
Two documents, published a decade apart, mapped out in granular detail how the United States and its allies could weaken two governments treated as strategic adversaries: Russia and Iran. What follows traces each document against the war that came after it, not to establish that the papers exist, which is beyond dispute, but to show how precisely the sequence of sanctions, weapons transfers, strikes, and political interventions in both theatres followed the categories each report laid out years, in some cases decades, in advance. |
| Extending Russia: the menu and the war |
The RAND report, authored by James Dobbins, a former US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, alongside Raphael Cohen, Nathan Chandler, Bryan Frederick, Edward Geist, Paul DeLuca, Forrest Morgan, Howard Shatz, and Brent Williams, examined Russia’s economic, political, and military vulnerabilities across four domains: ideological, economic, geopolitical, and military. It graded each option by benefit, cost, risk, and likelihood of success. The report’s own conclusion, stated plainly in its summary, was that the most attractive options for the United States lay in the economic domain, specifically a combination of expanded American energy production and multilateral sanctions, while geopolitical measures designed to draw Russia into overextension were judged largely impractical or excessively risky. |
Among the geopolitical measures RAND did examine was the provision of lethal military assistance to Ukraine, described in the report as a potentially productive way to overextend and weaken Russia’s position along its western periphery. The report also considered, and in most cases rejected on cost grounds, options such as deploying intermediate-range missiles to Europe, expanding NATO’s Black Sea posture, and stationing additional troops in the Baltic states. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a sequence of policies unfolded that maps closely onto the report’s stated priorities: successive rounds of coordinated Western sanctions on Russian banking, energy exports, and technology imports; a rapid expansion of American liquefied natural gas exports into European markets that had previously depended on Russian pipeline gas; and an escalating supply of Western weapons to Kyiv, moving from portable anti-tank systems in the war’s opening months to longer-range strike capabilities as the conflict continued. |
A retrospective assessment published by the Colombo-based Factum think tank in 2023 noted that some RAND-endorsed measures produced the intended strain on Moscow, while others, including the sanctions push itself, generated costs that fell heavily on European economies and populations rather than on Russia alone, and that the broader strategy of extending Russia may rest on a flawed premise regarding NATO’s own role in provoking the confrontation it was designed to manage. That is a documented, published critique of the plan’s execution, not a dismissal of the plan’s existence, and it belongs inside any honest reading of how closely reality has tracked the paper. |
| Which Path to Persia: the menu and the war |
Brookings’ Iran volume, credited to Pollack, Daniel Byman, Martin Indyk, Suzanne Maloney, Michael O’Hanlon, and Bruce Riedel, was structured around four broad categories: diplomacy, military action, regime change, and containment. Its military chapters examined, among other options, a full air campaign against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, an operation modelled explicitly on Israel’s 1981 Osirak strike against Iraq, and what the authors termed allowing or encouraging an Israeli strike rather than a direct American one. Its regime-change chapters examined support for a popular uprising, support for minority insurgent movements, and support for a military coup. Its diplomatic chapters discussed a negotiated framework substantial enough that Iran’s government could plausibly be manoeuvred into rejecting it, thereby providing international cover for subsequent military action. The authors were careful to present these as options rather than recommendations, and stated explicitly that the collection did not represent the individual views of any single contributor. |
The subsequent seventeen years produced a documented sequence that touches nearly every category the volume outlined. Washington and its European partners pursued sanctions and, later, the 2015 nuclear agreement, which the Trump administration abandoned in 2018. The Mojahedin-e-Khalq, an Iranian opposition group the Brookings volume identified among possible instruments of pressure, was removed from the US State Department’s foreign terrorist organisation list in 2012. Iran’s Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani was killed in a January 2020 American drone strike. In June 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, a twelve-day campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities, ballistic missile infrastructure, and military and scientific personnel, killing several senior commanders and at least ten nuclear scientists. The United States joined on 22 June with Operation Midnight Hammer, striking three fortified nuclear sites directly, an intervention that fits the Brookings chapter on direct American air action rather than the chapter on merely permitting an Israeli one. A ceasefire followed on 24 June. Eight months later, in February 2026, Israel and the United States launched a second and larger campaign; Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed in the opening strikes, and President Trump publicly urged Iranians to seize the opportunity to remove their government, describing it as an opportunity that would likely not recur for a generation. |
Read against the Brookings menu, the events of 2025 and 2026 correspond closely to at least three of its named military and regime-change categories: an Osirak-style strike on nuclear infrastructure, direct American military engagement once Israeli capability proved insufficient on its own, and an explicit invitation to popular insurrection issued at the moment of maximum regime vulnerability. The Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv has itself described the 2026 campaign’s formal objective as the creation of conditions for regime change, while noting that outright removal of the government remained an aspiration rather than a binding operational goal, a distinction that mirrors the layered, incremental structure the 2009 volume proposed rather than a single decisive stroke. |
| Chapter Five: ‘Leave It to Bibi’ and the logic of plausible deniability |
Chapter Five of “Which Path To Persia?”, sits inside Part II of the Brookings volume, ‘Disarming Tehran: The Military Options,’ alongside chapters on full invasion and an Osirak-style airstrike, and its title states its content without much need for interpretation: ‘Leave It to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike.’ The chapter’s logic, read plainly, is that a sufficiently damaging Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure could produce outcomes highly favourable to Washington’s position while allowing the United States to appear not to have initiated the conflict, with American support supplied quietly rather than as the visible trigger. The sequence of 2025 matches this closely. Israel struck first, on 13 June, under its own operational codename, Operation Rising Lion, and the United States joined directly only nine days later, on 22 June, once Israeli capability against the most fortified sites, Fordow among them, proved insufficient on its own. That the United States ultimately struck directly complicates a literal reading of the chapter’s plausible-deniability device, since that logic weakens once Washington’s own aircraft are involved, but the sequencing, Israel first and the United States second, and the Israeli role as the political trigger that made subsequent American action publicly defensible, tracks the chapter’s structure closely enough that the resemblance is difficult to set aside as accidental. |
| The anticipated closure of the Strait of Hormuz |
The risk that any strike on Iran’s nuclear or military infrastructure would prompt Tehran to retaliate by closing or harassing traffic through the Strait of Hormuz was not a surprise discovered after the fact. It was a foreseeable and widely documented risk built into the planning literature years before June 2025, reflected in Belfer Center analysis assessing Iran’s capacity to halt or impede shipping through the strait for a month or more using mines, anti-ship missiles, and coastal defence assets, and warning that any American effort to reopen the waterway would likely escalate into sustained air and naval operations. When the wider war began on 28 February 2026, Iran did substantially what that literature had anticipated. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the strait closed to vessels linked to the United States, Israel, and their allies, attacked more than twenty ships, laid sea mines, and began charging a toll for safe passage, cutting seaborne oil and gas flows through the world’s most important energy chokepoint to a near standstill and pushing war-risk insurance premiums to several times their pre-war level. That the closure unfolded broadly as the risk literature described it, rather than as an unforeseen escalation, indicates the strategic planning behind the Iran campaign treated Hormuz disruption as an accepted cost of the operation rather than a failure to anticipate it. |
| Ceasefires as intervals: escalation management and the information domain |
RAND’s own framework organises US options across four domains, one of them explicitly ideological, covering information and messaging operations designed to weaken an adversary’s narrative position and public support, a domain that sits alongside economic and military pressure rather than beneath it in importance. In both theatres, the pattern since has been sequential rather than final. The twelve-day war in Iran ended in a ceasefire on 24 June 2025, not a settlement, and Israeli assessments published by the Institute for National Security Studies describe that campaign as having failed to establish a lasting outcome, with Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes substantially reconstituted within eight months, before the larger February 2026 campaign began. Ukraine shows a comparable rhythm: the Istanbul talks broken off in 2022; a partial thirty-day ceasefire in March 2025; a twenty-eight-point framework floated by US and Russian envoys in November 2025; further rounds in Abu Dhabi, Geneva, and Miami through early 2026, each reported as making progress and each stalling on the same core issues of Donbas control and NATO membership, without a durable settlement reached at the time of writing. Whichever theatre is examined, the practical effect is the same: a rolling cycle of talks and pauses that resets the operational clock without resolving the underlying contest, during which control of the narrative, over who is responsible for stalling talks, who broke which ceasefire, and what an acceptable outcome would look like, becomes as consequential to the strategic picture as territory or sanctions. |
| The China wedge: decoupling Europe, Iran, and Russia |
Neither the Russia nor the Iran file sits in isolation from Washington’s China strategy. RAND’s research programme has run a parallel line of work on what its analysts term wedge strategy, efforts to inject friction into the Russia-China relationship rather than allow the two governments to consolidate a joint front against the United States. A RAND research brief examining the prospects for US-China and US-Russia security cooperation frames managing two great-power adversaries at once as among the foremost challenges facing American strategy, and a 2025 CNA study recommended using sanctions and tariff pressure specifically to raise the cost of Chinese-Russian economic coordination. The European energy detachment that followed the 2022 invasion, replacing Russian pipeline gas with American liquefied natural gas, serves this purpose on two fronts simultaneously: it weakens Russia’s principal source of hard currency, and it reduces the degree to which the European economy sits inside a Eurasian energy architecture that Moscow and Beijing might otherwise use as leverage over the continent. Iran fits the same pattern from the opposite direction. Tehran signed a twenty-five-year strategic cooperation agreement with Beijing in 2021 and has deepened trilateral coordination with Moscow since, and successive rounds of sanctions and military pressure on Iran serve, among other functions, to limit how reliable an economic and military partner Tehran can be for either power. Read together, the Russia and Iran files function as two fronts of a single containment architecture aimed at preventing the consolidation of a functioning Eurasian bloc anchored by China. |
| Primacy and energy dominance as the organising objective |
The purpose running through both documents, and through the 2018 National Defense Strategy that RAND’s Russia report explicitly cites as its point of departure, is the preservation of American primacy in a great-power competition Washington regards itself as at risk of losing ground in. RAND’s own conclusion ranks expanded American energy production alongside sanctions as the single most effective and lowest-risk tool available against Russia, a finding that anticipated the language later used by successive US administrations to describe the goal of American energy dominance: displacing Russian gas in European markets, expanding LNG export capacity, and treating that leverage as an instrument of foreign policy rather than purely as a commercial good. The same logic runs through the Iran file from a different angle. Iran sits astride the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint for roughly one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and gas trade, and a Tehran capable of threatening that chokepoint at will is a standing constraint on how freely Washington can project the primacy the 2018 strategy documents assume. Weakening Iran’s capacity to hold the strait hostage, like weakening Russia’s capacity to hold European energy markets hostage, serves the same underlying objective, of keeping the flow of global energy, and with it a central lever of American power, outside the control of a rival state. |
| What the fighting itself has shown |
Both wars remain active, and the plans embedded within them have already been revised more than once by battlefield outcomes nobody could have scripted in advance. RAND’s economic core for the Russia file, energy competition paired with multilateral sanctions, required the least adaptation because its success never depended on events inside Russian territory. American liquefied natural gas displaced Russian pipeline supply across European markets on roughly the timeline RAND’s authors anticipated, and the sanctions regime targeting Russian banking and semiconductor imports expanded rather than retreated. Everything downstream of that economic core has bent under pressures the original planning documents could not have anticipated, particularly the drone warfare that reshaped Ukrainian and Russian tactics within a single fighting season and forced both militaries to rewrite their assumptions mid-campaign. |
The Iran file demonstrates the same structural pattern against a harder target, absorbing sharper and more expensive surprises along the way. The 2009 volume’s sequence, an Osirak-style strike, direct American air action once Israeli strikes alone proved insufficient, and an eventual appeal to popular uprising, tracks the actual progression from the June 2025 campaign through the American strikes that followed and the explicit calls for Iranian insurrection after the Israeli Air Force killed Khamenei in the February 2026 strikes on Tehran. Washington’s assumption that removing Iran’s leadership would collapse organized resistance quickly did not survive contact with Tehran’s actual military inventory. Iran answered with drone and missile stockpiles larger and more precise than American and Israeli planners had modeled, struck United States and Gulf Cooperation Council bases across Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan within days, and preserved underground facilities built deep enough to survive the opening wave of strikes. Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz entirely, a move the Joint Chiefs of Staff had warned Trump about explicitly before authorizing the February strikes, and later floated closing Bab el-Mandeb once Hormuz alone failed to force American concessions. None of that specific retaliatory architecture appears anywhere in the 2009 Brookings text, and its absence there does not weaken the case that Washington and Jerusalem were still executing the sequence that document laid out. The phases arrived in roughly the order Brookings described even as their duration, cost, and violence exceeded what any planning document could have modeled for an adversary with functioning missile production and hardened infrastructure. |
Institutional planning documents are built around sequence, not around guaranteed timing, and Tehran’s refusal to collapse on schedule tested that distinction directly. Structure held through five months of escalation while nearly every operational detail inside it required revision under fire. |
That same distinction between structure and detail explains why the internal risk grading in both reports fails to undercut the pattern described above. Officials commissioning planning documents typically demand built-in deniability before adopting any politically sensitive option, and both reports reflect that institutional habit rather than genuine reluctance. RAND’s cost accounting around extending Russia and Brookings’ refusal to formally endorse regime change over containment both read as standard bureaucratic hedging rather than evidence against design. Institutional policy planning looks exactly like this before it gets translated into classified guidance and handed to officials who, in several documented cases, were the same authors sitting in different government chairs years later. Reading that caution as proof of innocence confuses the genre conventions of policy writing with the substance underneath them. |
Extending Russia and Which Path to Persia are the published record of how Washington’s own planning apparatus assessed two governments it wanted weakened, written by people who went on to hold the offices that carried the assessments out. The sanctions and energy architecture built against Russia after 2022, the Osirak-style strike on Iran’s nuclear programme in June 2025, the direct American intervention that followed within days, and the public appeal to Iranian insurrection after February 2026 do not sit near the language of these two documents by accident. They sit inside it. Strategic policy of this kind is drafted in institutions like RAND and Brookings before it is adopted by government, and the wars fought in Ukraine and Iran since are the operational continuation of work these two institutions had already put on paper, in the open, years before the first shot was fired. |
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Dobbins, J., Cohen, R. S., Chandler, N., Frederick, B. A., Geist, E., DeLuca, P., Morgan, F. E., Shatz, H. J. and Williams, B. (2019) Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Available at: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html |
Pollack, K. M., Byman, D. L., Indyk, M., Maloney, S., O’Hanlon, M. E. and Riedel, B. (2009) Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran. Washington, DC: Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06_iran_strategy.pdf |
Cartalucci, T. (2016) ‘Iran: Lifting Sanctions and Coming Betrayal’, New Eastern Outlook, 27 January. |
Dinucci, M. (2022) ‘Ukraine, It Was All Written in the Rand Corp Plan’, Global Research/TRANSCEND Media Service, 14 March. |
Pollack, K. M. et al. (2009) Which Path to Persia?, Chapter 5, ‘Leave It to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike’, pp. 125-149. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. |
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