Hey everyone,

This is not a normal week. The Under Report is going to focus entirely on what's happening in Iran and what it means for the world.

We're skipping the usual format and go deep on the five things you need to understand about Operation Epic Fury, now 72 hours old. These are the questions that aren't being asked on cable news, and the answers should concern you regardless of where you sit politically.

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— Eric

P.S. Check out the NEW UNDER REPORT PODCAST each episode is a deep dive into the stories which move the world without making headlines.

By any tactical measure, the opening days of this war have been devastating for Iran. You'll find however, that destruction is no quick path to victory when goals are unclear. You can't negotiate with a pile of rubble.

Within the first 72 hours: over 1,000 targets struck across 24 of Iran's 31 provinces. Supreme Leader Khamenei is dead. Senior military and intelligence officials are dead. 88 leaders of elite council of religious elite were bombed and CENTCOM has stated that the majority of the Iranian navy has been sunk.

That is an impressive opening salvo. It doesn't achieve a win state by a long shot.

Here's the math that matters. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken immediately after the strikes showed only 27% of Americans approve of this operation. Among independents, the voters who decide midterms, it's 19%.

On Sunday, Pentagon briefers told congressional staff something extraordinary: there was no intelligence suggesting Iran planned to attack U.S. forces first. That directly contradicts the White House's stated rationale for launching the war. The truth has not mattered for the Trump administration, but its ability to shape perceptions while American service members are dying will weaken rapidly.

Congress will vote on war powers resolutions this week, led by Senators Kaine and Paul in the Senate and Representatives Khanna and Massie in the House. Those votes will probably fail, and a veto override is almost certainly out of reach. But they will put every member on record six months before the midterms. This is a brutal timeline that the Iranians are aware of, but there's an even shorter one:

The US is running out of ammo.

U.S. military is burning through precision-guided munitions at an unsustainable rate. Trump told the Daily Mail the operation could last four to five weeks. The Joint Chiefs Chairman said accomplishing objectives will take "some time" and involve "difficult and gritty work." However, the best estimated of CSIS and IISS forecast only about a week or two of precision guided munitions. After that the U.S. will need to rearm while negotiating deals with allies to maintain pressure.

This war would be much easier to sell if its goals were reachable within the timeframe. The stated objectives, denuclearizing Iran, destroying its missile program, degrading proxy networks, and catalyzing regime change, are not four-week objectives. They are multi-year ambitions.

Short version here:

The objectives require months. The politics allow weeks. Tehran has decentralized assets to cause economic, social, and political pain to the US and its allies. Also, it's been preparing for this for 40 years.

The most consequential development of this war isn't the Khamenei assassination. It's the strategic lesson Iran absorbed from the June 2025 ceasefire.

During the 12-Day War last summer, Iran paced its responses. Measured salvos, calculated restraint, diplomatic signaling. It warned US allies of its intentions to launch missiles. Tehran telegraphed a punch coming to Tel Aviv with a salvo of missiles which took hours to reach their destinations. It agreed to a ceasefire. Ultimately, it was diplomacy by war.

Then the U.S. and Israel used the intervening months to restock, remobilize, and launch a campaign of far greater scale and ambition.

As Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute noted, “The June ceasefire taught Tehran that restraint only buys your enemy time to prepare the next war.”

So Iran isn't doing that again.

Instead of single salvos of 50 missiles, Iran is maintaining a continuous rhythm of distributed attacks. Strikes on 27 U.S.-linked bases. Missile and drone attacks across eight Arab states. Strikes on Israel. An attack on a British base in Cyprus. Targeted hits on commercial shipping in and around the Strait of Hormuz.

The damage per individual strike is lower, but that's by design. Iran concluded that Israel's pain tolerance is effectively unlimited as long as the U.S. stays in the fight. So the focus has shifted to the U.S. and to everyone around it. The threat of missile attacks at any time can paralyze the global system and that's the goal. But the real target is global economics.

Iran struck the Ras Tanura oil refinery in Saudi Arabia. It hit Dubai's international airport and a luxury hotel. It targeted the U.S. Embassy compound in Kuwait. It struck a French military facility in the UAE. It sent a drone into RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, an EU member state.

Every one of those targets was chosen to expand the war's international politic cost. Every time the U.S. uses billions of dollars of missiles hunting down thousands of dollars worth of drones, Iran wins. Meanwhile, when one of those missiles hits a school of young girls, Tehran claims the moral high ground and wins the media war.

These conditions should have been considered before the first bomb was dropped, but it doesn't appear they were.

Unfortunately, the difficulties don't end with cost.

No actor in this conflict is in a worse position than the Gulf Cooperation Council states. They didn't start this war. Most actively lobbied against it. The Omani Foreign Minister, who mediated the Geneva talks, publicly described the negotiations as making "significant progress" before the strikes began. Now those same countries are absorbing Iranian missiles while hosting the American bases that Iran is targeting.

The trilemma is not good:

Option one: Retaliate against Iran, formally entering a war that would devastate the tourism, logistics, and financial services economies that Dubai, Doha, and Riyadh have spent decades building. (Also, none of these countries have armies which could sustain combat operations collectively or on their own).

Option two: Absorb the strikes and watch shipping insurance premiums, airline cancellations, and capital flight erode economic confidence by the day. Option three: pressure Washington to stop. Which is precisely what Iran's cost-expansion strategy is designed to produce.

Option three: Call for peace and mediation in public while back channeling to Iran to plead for missiles to land on American bases and not tourist infrastructure.

The GCC issued a joint statement affirming the "right to self-defense," but the language was carefully ambiguous. Meanwhile, Kuwaiti air defenses accidentally shot down three American F-15E Strike Eagles during active combat. All six crew ejected safely, but the incident tells you everything about the chaos of operating in a multi-national battlespace where your coalition partners didn't volunteer for the fight.

Now look at the economic picture.

Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has effectively halted. Brent crude is up nearly 9%, trading around $79 a barrel. European natural gas futures surged over 40% after Qatar suspended LNG production. This isn't a risk premium event. Physical barrels are being affected across crude, products, LPG, and LNG simultaneously. Every day the Strait is in danger the economic argument for ending this war gets louder from Abu Dhabi to Brussels.

The Council on Foreign Relations put it plainly within hours of Khamenei's death: taking out the Supreme Leader is not the same as regime change. The IRGC is the regime. This assessment is shared across the analytical spectrum. CSIS, the Atlantic Council, Chatham House, Peter Zeihan, and the Quincy Institute all converge on this point.

Iran's theocratic system has institutional depth that a decapitation strike cannot reach. There are over 15,000 mullahs in the clerical hierarchy. The IRGC controls vast economic and military resources independently of the Supreme Leader's office. A three-person interim leadership council was operational within 24 hours. Street celebrations after Khamenei's death were widespread, but no organized mobilization materialized.

Security forces deployed. The internet went dark. That window is closing.

The deeper concern isn't regime survival. It's the alternative. Every regional actor, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, fears Iranian state collapse more than regime continuity. Collapse means millions of refugees flowing into Turkey and the Gulf. It means Kurdish, Baluchi, and Azeri secessionist movements igniting on multiple borders. It means loose weapons, factional civil war, and the disappearance of Iran as a strategic buffer between Israel and its Sunni Arab neighbors.

The regional states need that buffer. Without it, they believe they become the next targets. The worst outcome is violent fracture and escalating civil war. Unfortunately, this is the most likely outcome.

The U.S. has never been good at sticking the landing. This conflict is no different. There is no off-ramp.

Iran will not negotiate. Ali Larijani, now the country's most senior security official, said it explicitly: "We will not negotiate with the United States." This follows directly from Iran's assessment of the June ceasefire. Any pause will be exploited for the next round of attacks.

Trump cannot accept a ceasefire without a deliverable. He launched this campaign promising to eliminate Iran's nuclear capacity, destroy its missile program, and catalyze regime change. Walking away with nothing to show would be politically devastating, especially with midterms approaching and approval already at 27%.

Congress cannot stop the war. Even if both war powers resolutions pass, and they probably won't, Trump will veto. Neither chamber has the two-thirds majority to override.

The Omanis are trying to keep diplomatic channels alive. But the people on the Iranian side who were engaged in the Geneva talks are, in many cases, dead. The interim leadership council has no mandate and no incentive to negotiate from a position of national mourning and active bombardment.

Every historical parallel, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, required a willing negotiating partner on the other side. Iran's calculus is clear: no negotiation until the cost to the United States rises dramatically further. Meanwhile, Israel seems intent on killing anyone who might be on the other side of the negotiating table. We may be watching the first major American military campaign since 1945 launched without a viable theory of how it ends.

The question "how does this end?" should have been asked before the first bomb. It wasn't. And 72 hours in, there is still no answer visible. Not from the White House, not from Tehran, and not from any of the regional or international actors scrambling to contain the fallout.

That should keep everyone up at night.

The Under Report is your weekly intelligence brief about the stories that move the world without making headlines.

Check out my book You Are Not Here: Travels Through Countries That Don't Exist and explore the world’s unrecognized countries.

Eric Czuleger is a journalist and travel writer who has lived and worked in over 47 countries. He holds a masters degree from the University of Oxford and he is completing a National Security degree from the RAND school of public policy. He's the author of You Are Not Here: Travels Through Countries That Don’t Exist, and host of the “The_Under_Report” TikTok channel.