Iran now, Taiwan later
(First of two parts)
There is an episode of “The West Wing” that I have been thinking about since the Iran conflict began, and which now feels less like fiction and more like prophecy.
In “A Proportional Response,” the third episode of the series, written by Aaron Sorkin, President Bartlet is furious after Syria shoots down an American military plane. He wants a disproportionate response, something devastating.
His military advisers present a proportional strike package, and Bartlet rejects it: “What is the virtue of a proportional response?” He demands they come up with a plan that would destroy an airport and kill thousands of civilians.
His chief of staff, Leo McGarry, talks him down. When Bartlet objects that the proportional targets will just be rebuilt, McGarry replies: “Then we’ll blow ‘em up again in six months! We’re getting really good at it.”
In June 2025, when Operation Midnight Hammer struck Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan with 75 precision-guided weapons in 25 minutes, the United States was, in effect, following McGarry’s advice.
It was a surgical, proportional degradation of Iran’s nuclear enrichment infrastructure.
Whatever one thinks of the legality or wisdom of those strikes, there was a defensible strategic logic to them: degrade the capability, keep the option to do it again and leave room for diplomacy.
But the United States did not stop there. What has happened since February 2026, the renewed bombing campaign, the decapitation of Iranian leadership, the creep toward arming Kurdish proxies, the broadening of targets, this is no longer McGarry.
This is President Bartlet in his rage, demanding the disproportionate response, the one that McGarry had to physically pull him back from. Except in real life, there seems to be no Leo McGarry in the room.
The virtue of proportion
The United States has the power to destroy any facility on earth. The question is not whether it can, but whether each successive use of that power serves a strategic purpose or merely satisfies an emotional need for dominance.
The June 2025 strikes served a strategic purpose. Iran had sharply increased its stockpile of uranium enriched to 60-percent purity, reaching over 408 kilograms by May 2025, enough for multiple nuclear weapons if further enriched.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had censured Iran. Diplomatic talks had collapsed after Israel’s initial strikes on June 13. In that context, a narrowly tailored operation to degrade enrichment infrastructure, while leaving the door open for renewed negotiations, had a logic that even skeptics could acknowledge.
The IAEA director general, Rafael Grossi, assessed that Iran could resume enrichment in a matter of months. But, if they rebuild, you degrade it again.
You maintain leverage without destroying the state, without eliminating the possibility of a negotiated settlement and without crossing lines that invite catastrophic retaliation.
The killing of Ayatollah Khamenei and the besiegement of Iran that followed changed everything.
Sun Tzu wrote that it is better to take a state whole than to destroy it, better to capture an army intact than to annihilate it. The highest form of generalship is to break the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
What is the plan for the day after in Iran? The answer, as of this writing, appears to be: arm the Kurds, hope for an internal uprising and see what happens. This is not statecraft. This is almost archetypal cowboy-movie improvisation.
Reports indicate that the Central Intelligence Agency is negotiating with Iranian Kurdish groups to arm them for a ground offensive in western Iran.
Trump has reportedly spoken with Kurdish leaders, including Mustafa Hijri of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, and with Iraqi Kurdish leaders Masoud Barzani and Bafel Talabani.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is said to have lobbied for this Kurdish connection for months, with Mossad backing. Secretary Marco Rubio reportedly told Congress in a closed-door briefing: “We’re not arming the Kurds. But you never know with the Israelis.”
I have referred to this approach in a previous column as the “Yemenization” of Iran, with potentially worse outcomes than what has become of the Red Sea as a result of Yemen’s splintering into pieces. Iran has roughly 88 million people, significant mountainous terrain and multiple ethnic constituencies, including Kurds, Baluchis, Azeris and Arabs, that external actors can attempt to activate. Iran is much, much bigger than Yemen. And the consequences of its fragmentation would be far worse for the world economy and for regional order.
The Kurdish card and its costs
Arming Iranian Kurds will alienate Turkey, and with it, potentially Syria. Turkey regards Kurdish separatism as an existential threat.
If the United States now arms Kurdish forces on Turkey’s border, it risks destroying the fragile arrangements established in the area.
It will push Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organizationally, toward actively supporting Iran. It will potentially waste the goodwill recently earned in Syria, where Turkey has been a key supporter of the new government under Ahmed al-Sharaa, and where it has shown relative restraint toward Israel’s advances in Syrian territory.
(To be continued)
The author is a former congressman of Albay and also previously served as its provincial governor. He also earlier served as chief of staff of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Before entering politics, he was an award-winning stock market analyst who headed the Philippine research team of UBS and ING. He currently chairs the Institute for Risk and Strategic Studies Inc./Salceda Research.
