Switzerland with Tom Switzer

This week on Switzerland, Tom Switzer is joined by Professor Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University.
Subjects include the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks: what did America learn –- and what did it fail to learn? How much of the foreign-policy thinking that emerged from that moment still shapes the Trump administration? When will US leaders recognise limits to military and economic power in a messy world that won’t conform to America’s expectations? When will Washington, to use a neoconservative phrase, get mugged by reality?  
Plus, is the tide turning against Tehran? After all, Iran has failed to shut Hormuz completely. The global economy has proved remarkably resilient. And the American naval blockade is severely restricting Iran’s oil exports, placing mounting pressure on its already fragile economy.
And is Ukraine really winning the war against Russia, as several western commentators allege? Or are Moscow’s strategic gains in eastern Ukraine irreversible?

It’s been more than six months into the war with Iran, and the question that matters is becoming harder to avoid: who is actually losing this war?
  The conventional wisdom has been that Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran was a catastrophic strategic blunder — that Tehran could absorb the punishment, close the Strait of Hormuz and inflict enormous economic costs on America and its allies.
But the picture now looks rather more complicated. Iran has failed to shut Hormuz completely, the global economy has proved remarkably resilient, and the American naval blockade is severely restricting Iran’s oil exports and squeezing its already fragile economy.
Is the strategic clock now ticking against Tehran? Has the balance of the war begun to shift?  Is Iran running out of time? Or does Washington still face the greater strategic and political costs? And what does this war tell us about the future of American power, the Middle East and the cycle of military intervention that has defined U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11 terror attacks 25 years ago?
Trita Parsi is from the Quincy Institute and Stephen Wertheim is from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Both are based in Washington, DC.

The conventional wisdom holds that the US war on Iran has been a massive strategic blunder. As John Mearsheimer has repeatedly argued, Washington went to war with four principal objectives: regime change, ending Iran’s uranium-enrichment program, destroying its ballistic-missile capabilities, and dismantling its network of militia proxies. None has been achieved. Add to this the damage inflicted on America’s alliance structure and the risks to US military bases across the region, and it is easy to see why Mearsheimer’s assessment -- that President Trump has presided over a foreign-policy debacle -- has gained such a wide following.
But what if it is the Islamic Republic of Iran that is now in serious trouble?
The US naval blockade is inflicting economic pain on Iran, while Tehran’s attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz has so far failed to produce the global energy crisis that many predicted. The world economy has proved surprisingly resilient, while Iran’s ability to export its oil is being severely constrained.
What if, as the American scholar and columnist Walter Russell Mead has suggested, President Trump can keep as much energy as possible flowing through and around the Strait while simultaneously tightening the economic screws on Tehran? Could Iran’s rulers have overplayed their hand?
John Mearsheimer is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001).

Six months after Donald Trump launched his war on Iran, the regime survives, the Strait of Hormuz remains contested, and Washington is struggling to turn military might into a political victory. 
Trump and his supporters can make a credible case that Iran has been severely damaged. Its air force and much of its navy have been destroyed; its nuclear program has been set back; senior leadership has been decapitated; its economy is in terrible shape. But none of that necessarily translates into political leverage.  
What happens next? Tehran remains defiant and Washington faces dangerous questions: how do you end a war when military power cannot deliver political capitulation? And has America reached its limits in Iran? Has the Iran conflict fundamentally changed the strategic equation in Ukraine?
Patrick Cockburn is columnist with the I paper in London. 
Join Tom's Exclusive Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/cff5e11f69a3/switzerland-with-tom-switzer
Read Tom's Substack: https://substack.com/@tomswitzer
Tom Switzer is a journalist and broadcaster who has been a prolific commentator on politics and international affairs. His writing and commentary have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times (international), The Australian, and across ABC and News24 (formerly Sky News), where he has been a regular presenter and panellist. For 30 years, since 1995, he has worked at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, the Australian Financial Review, The Australian, the London-based Spectator magazine, and the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies, which he headed from 2017 to 2025. He is the host of Switzerland, a long-form interview series exploring global politics, modern history, and the ideas shaping the world.

President Donald Trump is seeking to revive his personal diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un while substantially reducing US military exercises with South Korea. What does this mean for the future of the US–South Korean alliance -- and for deterrence on the Korean Peninsula?
But the stakes extend far beyond the Korean Peninsula. The war with Iran has raised fresh questions about whether the US is becoming overstretched militarily, particularly as Washington shifts resources towards the Middle East while asking its Asian allies to shoulder more of the burden for their own defence.
What does this mean for South Korea, Japan and the wider US security presence in East Asia? Will a perceived weakening of American commitment encourage China to become more assertive around Taiwan and elsewhere? Could Trump’s approach ultimately produce greater burden-sharing among America’s allies, or could it undermine confidence in US leadership and accelerate an arms race across East Asia? And as North Korea’s nuclear arsenal grows and China’s military power expands, what should America’s long-term defence posture in the Indo-Pacific look like?
Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where he researches and writes extensively on international security in the Korean Peninsula and Asia, demographics, and economic development.
Join Tom's Exclusive Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/cff5e11f69a3/switzerland-with-tom-switzer
Read Tom's Substack: https://substack.com/@tomswitzer
Tom Switzer is a journalist and broadcaster who has been a prolific commentator on politics and international affairs. His writing and commentary have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times (international), The Australian, and across ABC and News24 (formerly Sky News), where he has been a regular presenter and panellist. For 30 years, since 1995, he has worked at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, the Australian Financial Review, The Australian, the London-based Spectator magazine, and the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies, which he headed from 2017 to 2025. He is the host of Switzerland, a long-form interview series exploring global politics, modern history, and the ideas shaping the world.

Donald Trump has pledged to intensify the U.S. campaign of economic warfare on Tehran, but he faces serious challenges. Iran maintains its ability to threaten shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. And there are growing strains on US naval and munitions stockpiles. Time is not on Trump’s side -- and the war will continue to expose serious limits to America’s ability to sustain its traditional military posture in the region.
John Mearsheimer is professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
Rosemary Kelanic is the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities in Washington.

The U.S. naval blockade is costing Iran’s regime dearly in terms of lost economic activity, sky-high inflation, unemployment and a collapsing Iranian currency. President Trump says that the regime “is in very bad shape” economically and unable to pay its troops. Could the Islamic Republic of Iran still collapse?
To what extent does the new Sunni-run, pro-US Syria complicate Tehran’s effort to assert a Pax Iranica in the region? Has Iran’s Shia crescent -- the vast region stretching from southern Lebanon to southern Iraq and the Houthi parts of Yemen -- come unstuck?
Bashar al-Assad was not just an ally of Tehran’s but also Moscow’s. Russia long maintained a military presence in Syria, dating to the Soviet era. What kind of deal has Syria and Russia now reached? And what to make of the recent trials of Assad and his family? Is Syria on the path to becoming a viable democratic state?
Joshua Landis is the head of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

For decades, the prevailing assumption was that nuclear weapons had made a Third World War almost unthinkable. Yet an increasing number of serious strategists, historians and commentators are now asking whether that confidence is still justified. 
While Donald Trump’s temperament has undoubtedly heightened concerns about miscalculation, it is too simplistic to blame one man for the world’s growing instability. 
The deeper story is the steady erosion of the post-Cold War international order, the return of great-power rivalry, and the convergence of multiple geopolitical flashpoints stretching from Ukraine and the Middle East to the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula.
Nuclear deterrence continues to impose powerful constraints on the major powers, just as it has for much of the past eight decades. The real risk is not that world leaders deliberately seek global conflict, but that separate crises begin to reinforce one another in ways that even experienced statesmen struggle to contain.
For more, read Tom Switzer’s essay “The Guns of August: Are We on the Brink of World War III?” in The Spectator magazine: https://spectator.com/article/brink-world-war-three-guns-august/
Join Tom's Exclusive Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/cff5e11f69a3/switzerland-with-tom-switzer
Read Tom's Substack: https://substack.com/@tomswitzer
Tom Switzer is a journalist and broadcaster who has been a prolific commentator on politics and international affairs. His writing and commentary have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times (international), The Australian, and across ABC and News24 (formerly Sky News), where he has been a regular presenter and panellist. For 30 years, since 1995, he has worked at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, the Australian Financial Review, The Australian, the London-based Spectator magazine, and the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies, which he headed from 2017 to 2025. He is the host of Switzerland, a long-form interview series exploring global politics, modern history, and the ideas shaping the world.

It’s become increasingly clear that the Iran war has been a spectacular failure. There is just no plausible military outcome that produces the political result Washington says it wants.
Which raises an important question: If the United States has overwhelming military superiority, why has it become so difficult for Washington to turn military power into political victory?
The sad reality is that time and again the U.S. chooses objectives that are either unattainable, poorly defined, or disconnected from the political realities of the country it is fighting. For Washington has a long record of fighting the wrong war for the wrong objective. Why does this keep happening?
Stephen Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine and professor of international relations at Harvard University. Read his latest column here: https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/08/05/iran-trump-lost-wars-us-military-history-strategy-geopolitics/ 
 

Hardly a day goes by without another indication that the international order is in flux. But as the war in Iran enters a new phase, some questions are becoming increasingly urgent.
What do we know about the emerging Iranian-Omani discussions over the Strait of Hormuz? What might they mean for the future control and security of the strait? And what more can Donald Trump do to secure an outcome that could plausibly be called an American victory?
Then there is the internal struggle within Iran. How deep is the divide between hardliners, who oppose negotiations with Washington and favour pursuing complete victory, and supporters of President Masoud Pezeshkian and the powerful parliamentary speaker who is also serving as Iran’s chief negotiator? Who currently has the upper hand? And is the regime in danger of overplaying its hand?
Finally, what should we make of the new joint defence pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan? Three of the world’s most powerful Sunni Muslim nations -- one of them a NATO member -- have agreed that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on all. What lies behind the pact, and what does it tell us about the emerging balance of power in the Middle East?
And what to make of Israel’s rejection of a US-backed plan aimed at a phased disarmament of Hamas in Gaza?
John Mearsheimer is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and author, most recently, of How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy.
Vali Nasr is Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, and author of Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History.