Gary Anderson
Before retiring from a teaching position at George Washington University last year, I ended each semester with a war game in which Iranian factions competed with each other to craft a response to an Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear program and an American proposal to end the crisis. The three decision-making elites consisted of the Supreme Leader and his Guardian Council, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the executive branch (President, Foreign Ministry, regular security forces, and the rest of the professional bureaucracy).
Over the course of 15 years, there were a number of outcomes, but there was one common thread; survival of each elite group rather than the nuclear program was the primary concern of the players. The graduate students had spent much of the semester researching the motivation and cultures of their assigned group and I think their reactions were well informed. When I retired last spring I knew that I would probably have had to change the scenario if I stuck around for another year. President Trump had made it clear that he intended to disrupt the status quo.
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