Luke Ford

Holly Dagres is best understood through David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory as the diaspora interpreter of Iranian society for the Washington policy ecosystem.

Her function is not military analysis like Afshon Ostovar and not nuclear strategy like Reid Pauly. Her role is to explain what Iranian society is thinking and feeling, especially the younger generation that dominates protests.

Institutional location: Dagres is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. That organization sits firmly inside the pro-Israel and Iran-hawk policy coalition in Washington. It has deep connections to the U.S. national security establishment and frequently supplies analysis used by policymakers and journalists.

Dagres also runs The Iranist, a curated newsletter that aggregates Iranian social media, diaspora commentary, protest culture, and internal narratives circulating online.

That hybrid role places her at the intersection of three alliances.

The Washington foreign-policy community.
The Iranian diaspora information network.
Journalists covering Iranian domestic politics.

Her value to these groups comes from information filtering.

Iran is an extremely opaque society to outsiders. Independent media access is limited and state propaganda is constant. Social media, Telegram channels, and diaspora networks often provide the earliest signals of social unrest or cultural change.

Dagres curates and interprets those signals.

In Alliance Theory terms, she functions as a narrative bridge between Iranian society and Western elites.

Her analysis frequently emphasizes generational change. She highlights how Iranian Gen Z has rejected the ideological language of the Islamic Republic and increasingly expresses defiance through culture, memes, and protest symbolism.

That framing serves an alliance purpose.

It reinforces the idea within Western policy circles that the Islamic Republic faces deep legitimacy problems among younger Iranians. If a regime loses the loyalty of its youth, its long-term survival looks fragile.

You can see how this perspective fits comfortably within the Washington Institute’s broader worldview. The institute tends to argue that the Iranian regime is internally brittle and sustained mainly through repression.

Dagres’ work supplies the societal evidence that supports that argument.

Her analysis is widely used by journalists because she translates Iranian online discourse into accessible narratives. When Western media outlets report on protest slogans, generational anger, or viral anti-regime videos, her commentary often appears as contextual explanation.

That media presence amplifies her alliance role. She helps shape how Western audiences interpret Iranian unrest.

Her tone is usually descriptive rather than academic. She focuses on cultural cues, digital activism, and generational attitudes rather than abstract theory or military strategy.

Compared with other Iran analysts, she occupies a different niche.

Afshon Ostovar explains the regime’s military institutions.
Reid Pauly explains nuclear strategy and coercion.
Ali Vaez explains diplomatic pathways.

Dagres explains the social mood inside Iran.

In Alliance Theory terms, she provides the emotional and cultural data that helps the broader Iran-policy coalition understand the society the regime is ruling.

Her influence comes less from formal scholarship and more from information access and narrative framing. She helps Western policymakers and journalists interpret the signals emerging from Iranian society and especially from the younger generation challenging the regime’s authority.

Here is how her role is manifesting in the immediate context of the 2026 war and the aftermath of the “Epic Fury” strikes:

The “Generational Rupture” as a Tactical Variable

In her March 2026 brief, Iran on Day 13: Gauging Regime Choices and Public Attitudes After the War, Dagres argues that the current conflict has finalized a “moral point of no return” for Iranian Gen Z.

The Social Media Signal: While the regime attempts to use nationalist symbols to rally support during the U.S.-Israeli strikes, Dagres uses The Iranist to highlight a different reality. She points to viral videos of young Iranians refusing to walk on U.S. and Israeli flags painted on university floors.

Alliance Function: This data is gold for the “Maximum Pressure” coalition. It allows them to argue that the regime’s “rally around the flag” effect is a mirage. In Alliance Theory terms, she is providing the evidence that the regime’s “internal logic” of nationalist legitimacy has been successfully decoupled from the Iranian people.

Digital Resilience and “Starlink Diplomacy”

Dagres has been a primary advocate for restoring internet connectivity to Iranians during the current blackout.

Filtering for the Alliance: She recently highlighted how tens of thousands of smuggled Starlink terminals allowed Iranians to document the “Bloody January” crackdowns before the war began.

Policy Influence: By framing internet access as a “human rights imperative,” she coordinates the narrative between diaspora activists and the Trump administration. She makes “tech support for dissidents” a standard part of the U.S. strategic toolkit, moving it from a “nice-to-have” to a “core mission.”

Institutional Prestige and “The Iranist”

As the Libitzky Family Senior Fellow, her work carries the weight of an institution known for its “hawkish” but technically rigorous scholarship.

The “Credibility Bridge”: The Iranist acts as a high-status filter. Because she spent her teenage years in Iran and is fluent in Persian, she possesses a “tacit knowledge” that other Washington analysts lack. She can tell the difference between organic digital dissent and state-sponsored “astroturfing.” For the D.C. alliance, she is the trusted “decoder” of a chaotic information environment.

The “Bending the Knee” Diagnostic

In a recent March 7, 2026, interview with the Washington Post, Dagres noted that the clerical leadership is unlikely to capitulate because “bending the knee to Trump would go against everything they stand for.”

Analytical Grounding: This reinforces the “Assurance Dilemma” identified by Reid Pauly. It suggests that the regime’s ideological “logic” makes surrender an impossible move, regardless of the military cost. This helps the security alliance understand that the war might be a “protracted campaign” rather than a quick capitulation.

Holly Dagres is the narrative filter for the human element of the conflict. She ensures that when policymakers discuss “decapitation strikes” or “regime change,” they are doing so with an awareness of the 85 million people underneath the bombs. She provides the “societal data” that prevents the Washington alliance from seeing Iran as a monolithic block, instead revealing it as a fragmented society where the youth are often more aligned with the “global internet” than with their own government.

Reid Pauly is best understood through David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory as a theoretical strategist for the nonproliferation and coercive-diplomacy community. His role is not to advocate a specific Iran policy the way hawkish think tanks do. His function is to provide the conceptual framework that policymakers and analysts use when thinking about nuclear coercion and escalation.

Start with institutional location.

Brown University’s Watson Institute is a hub in the academic security-studies ecosystem. Pauly studies nuclear strategy, proliferation, and coercion and wrote The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma in 2025.

His career path runs through the classic security-studies pipeline:

MIT security studies program
Harvard Belfer Center fellowship
Stanford security centers
Brown Watson Institute faculty

That trajectory places him squarely inside the academic-strategic alliance network that feeds ideas into the Pentagon, intelligence community, and policy think tanks.

In Alliance Theory terms, Pauly’s role is epistemic infrastructure. He builds the models other actors use.

The key idea associated with Pauly right now is the “assurance dilemma.”

His argument is simple but powerful.

Coercion often fails not because threats are weak but because the target believes punishment will happen even if they comply.

If the target thinks surrender only leads to punishment anyway, defiance becomes rational.

That idea matters enormously for nuclear crises.

Applied to Iran, the logic looks like this:

If Tehran believes
– giving up nuclear capability still leads to regime destruction
– or permanent weakness

then building a nuclear weapon becomes the safest option.

That is exactly the scenario Pauly warns about when analysts talk about a nuclear “dash.”

In Alliance Theory terms, Pauly is serving a calibration function inside the Western strategy alliance.

Different factions inside that alliance include:

hawkish pressure advocates
arms-control specialists
military planners
academic strategists

Pauly’s scholarship acts as a shared analytical grammar for these groups.

Hawks cite his work to argue coercion must be credible.

Restraint advocates cite it to argue threats can backfire.

The same theory helps both sides debate policy while staying inside the same strategic framework.

His frequent media appearances about Iran’s “nuclear hedging” also fit this role.

“Nuclear hedging” means a state builds the capability for nuclear weapons without actually assembling one. It stays just short of the threshold.

Experts like Pauly analyze when pressure campaigns push hedging states to cross that threshold.

In the current war scenario, his warning is basically this:

Military pressure can stop a nuclear program.

But it can also convince the target that only a bomb guarantees survival.

That is the coercion paradox.

Another reason Pauly is quoted often is methodological.

He emphasizes wargaming and decision-making psychology in nuclear crises.

That makes his work appealing to:

military planners
crisis-simulation programs
defense policy analysts

These communities want models that explain how leaders behave under extreme stress.

Compared with other Iran experts:

Afshon Ostovar interprets the IRGC and Iranian military culture.

Ali Vaez represents the diplomatic engagement coalition.

Mark Dubowitz mobilizes the sanctions and pressure coalition.

Pauly sits at a deeper layer.

He produces the strategic theory that shapes how all of those coalitions think about coercion and escalation. Reid Pauly is a concept architect for the nuclear-strategy community. His job is not to tell policymakers what to do. It is to explain the strategic mechanics of coercion so the various factions inside the Western foreign-policy ecosystem can argue about Iran using the same intellectual map.

The Assurance Dilemma as a Crisis Diagnostic

Pauly’s primary contribution, the “assurance dilemma,” has become the go-to diagnostic tool for the current war. On March 6, 2026, Pauly noted that the transition from limited strikes to an all-out air campaign has shattered the “assurance” side of the equation.

The Logic of Compliance: In his 2025 book, The Art of Coercion, he argued that for coercion to work, the target must believe they will not be punished if they comply.

The 2026 Failure: He is currently cited to explain why Iran is retaliating rather than surrendering. The kill-strikes on top leadership—including the Supreme Leader—have signaled to the IRGC that they are “damned if they do, damned if they don’t.” When the threat of regime change becomes a perceived certainty, compliance loses its utility. Pauly’s work allows the security alliance to understand this not as “irrational Persian pride,” but as a structural byproduct of failed coercive signaling.

Preventing the “Nuclear Dash”

Pauly is the leading voice analyzing the risk of a nuclear dash in the vacuum left by Khamenei’s death.

The Strategic Paradox: He argues that while the current military campaign aims to destroy nuclear infrastructure, it simultaneously provides the strongest possible incentive for Iran to build a “survival bomb.”

Alliance Function: This creates a “logic of restraint” for the military planners who use his models. It moves the debate from “Can we hit the targets?” to “Will hitting these targets trigger the very outcome we want to prevent?” This is the “interplay” between kinetic force and strategic unintended consequences.

The Prestige of the Wargame

Pauly’s focus on wargaming and crisis simulation gives him unique standing among the “warrior-scholars” at the Naval Postgraduate School and the Pentagon.

Tacit Knowledge: Unlike traditional academics who rely on static models, Pauly uses wargames to account for “human fallibility, miscommunication, and hubris.”

Credentialing: This methodological choice signals to the military alliance that he understands the “fog of war.” It makes his theoretical work feel “useful” to people who have to make decisions in real-time, effectively bridging the gap between high-theory and operational reality.

Institutional Stability and the “Stanton” Pipeline

The Stanton Nuclear Security Fellowship (which he held at Stanford) and his current role at the Watson Institute mark him as a “vetted” node in the security-studies network.

Epistemic Coordination: This means that when he writes in International Security or Foreign Affairs, he is not just speaking for himself; he is coordinating the baseline assumptions of the entire nonproliferation community. He ensures that the “security-studies alliance” speaks a common language of “thresholds,” “hedging,” and “red lines.”

Reid Pauly provides the coercive logic that allows rival policy factions to understand why their actions are—or are not—producing the desired results.

He is the “logic-checker” for the Western security state. While the hawks and the diplomats fight over whether to pressure Iran, Pauly explains the mechanics of how that pressure actually interacts with the target’s survival instinct. In the chaos of March 2026, he is the voice reminding the alliance that if you take away an adversary’s “exit ramp,” you shouldn’t be surprised when they floor the accelerator.

Abbas Milani directs Iranian Studies at Stanford, which places him inside one of the highest-status academic institutions in the United States, but he is also an Iranian exile intellectual who openly supports democratic transformation in Iran. That combination lets him operate at the intersection of three alliances simultaneously: the Iranian diaspora opposition, the Western academic prestige system, and the policy community focused on Iran’s future.
His core function, in David Pinsof’s framework of Alliance Theory, is translation. He converts Iranian history and political culture into a language Western elites can use, and he frames the Islamic Republic as historically contingent rather than inevitable. That framing matters because it gives policymakers and diaspora activists a way to imagine regime change without imagining civilizational collapse.
His scholarship returns repeatedly to 1979 because the revolution is the origin myth of the current regime. Whoever explains that event shapes how people judge the legitimacy of the state that followed. Milani’s interpretation consistently emphasizes three things: that the revolution was not purely Islamist but a broad coalition revolt that clerics later captured; that Iran has a long tradition of constitutionalism and reform; and that the clerical state survives less through popular legitimacy than through coercion and economic patronage. Each of those arguments serves the same alliance function. Together they support the idea that Iran contains latent democratic forces capable of replacing the current regime.
His March 2026 New York Times essay, “The Coming Iranian Revolution,” calls the Islamic Republic a product of Khomeini’s bait-and-switch, a revolution that promised pluralism and delivered theocracy. That is not merely a historical claim. It gives Western elites moral clearance to support the regime’s dismantling by framing the current state as the result of deception rather than a genuine social contract. He reinforces this by arguing that the secular men and women of today simply want the rights they were promised in 1979. That framing makes regime change feel less like foreign imposition and more like restoration.
His institutional position amplifies that function. At Stanford he produces scholarly work on the Shah and the Pahlavi dynasty, reconstructing alternative political traditions that existed before the clerical state. At the Hoover Institution he applies that scholarship through projects like the Iran Democracy Project. The two roles work together. Stanford supplies the signal of academic credibility. Hoover supplies the policy channel. When Milani speaks, he arrives not as an activist but as a Stanford scholar, and that status distinction is precisely what the diaspora alliance needs to move opinion in Washington.
His economic commentary fits the same pattern. When he discusses the Iranian economy, he emphasizes how the Revolutionary Guard and clerical networks dominate key sectors, presenting the regime as a patronage machine rather than a guardian of Iranian civilization. That framing undercuts the state’s claim to nationalist legitimacy and repositions it as a corrupt extraction apparatus whose survival depends on control rather than competence.
One persistent obstacle for the pro-democracy alliance is the fear that regime collapse in Iran produces a Syrian-style civil war. Milani addresses this directly by pointing to Iran’s constitutional history, which dates to 1905, and to what he describes as a nimble and resilient civil society. By arguing that Iran is not Syria, he coordinates the expectations of Western policymakers. A secularized population with a history of institutional politics, he suggests, transitions toward normal life rather than state collapse.
His recent commentary on Reza Pahlavi reflects a related strategic move. In a January 2026 Foreign Policy piece he called the Crown Prince indispensable. In Alliance Theory, a movement that lacks a focal point fragments. Milani helps build that center by framing the monarchy not as a return to the past but as a symbol capable of uniting dispersed student movements with the older diaspora generation.
Milani is not a tactical policy analyst and not a regime insider interpreter. He is a long-range narrative builder. His job is to ensure that when Western elites look at the 2026 strikes and the death of Khamenei, they do not see chaos or Islamic resurgence. They see a malignant state finally failing and a secular democratic society waiting to emerge. He supplies the historical logic that makes the current war look like the beginning of the end for an illegitimate aberration rather than a war against a civilization.

Per Alliance Theory, Iran expert Afshon Ostovar is not an advocate like the hawks, and not a diplomat like the engagement camp. His function is translation. He explains the worldview of the Iranian revolutionary state to American and allied policy elites, and he does it from inside the U.S. national security apparatus itself.
His institutional location tells you almost everything. Ostovar teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, which is not a conventional university. It sits inside the professional security ecosystem. Its students are officers, analysts, and defense planners who need to understand adversaries well enough to anticipate their behavior. That placement puts Ostovar inside a coalition that includes military officers, intelligence analysts, Pentagon-linked think tanks, and security-studies academics. What unites them is not a shared policy preference but a shared professional need: accurate maps of how adversaries think.
His primary prestige asset is Vanguard of the Imam, widely regarded as the most serious English-language study of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. That book performs a specific alliance function. It gives the Western security community a coherent account of what the IRGC is, how it developed, and why it behaves as it does. Rather than portraying Iran as irrational or purely religious, Ostovar frames the IRGC as an ideological military institution with its own internal strategic logic. In Alliance Theory terms, that kind of work stabilizes elite understanding. It prevents the wild swings between caricature and naivety that make policy erratic. It gives rival factions inside the foreign policy ecosystem a shared map of the adversary, which lets them fight their battles on common analytical ground.
His core analytical contribution is the dismantling of the false divide between pragmatists and ideologues inside the Iranian state. He argues that the IRGC’s ideology is its strategy, that revolutionary fervor and tactical calculation are not opposites but a single unified logic. That reframing matters for the security alliance because it shifts the question away from searching for moderates and toward understanding how a clerical-military institution actually makes decisions. It gives planners a more stable predictive model.
The credibility of that model rests partly on method. Ostovar works from original Persian-language sources and IRGC internal media. In the competition for status among Iran analysts, that creates a high cost of entry for rivals. Political commentators who rely on translated news and secondary sources cannot easily contest his readings of the adversary’s own self-conception. That makes his work sticky inside the Pentagon and the Naval Postgraduate School in a way that op-ed commentary cannot replicate.
His style reflects his audience. Ostovar speaks in a calm, analytic tone. He avoids moral language and rhetorical escalation. That restraint is not accidental. His audience rewards professional credibility over political urgency. Compare him to Mark Dubowitz at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, whose sharper and more urgent rhetoric serves a different function: mobilizing political will among congressional hawks and conservative media. Ostovar’s job is different. He is the background explainer that other coalitions quietly rely on.
That explains why his work can support contradictory policy positions simultaneously. Hawks cite Vanguard of the Imam to argue the regime is ideological and expansionist and therefore must be pressured. Diplomats cite the same book to argue that Iranian behavior follows an internal logic that can be anticipated and therefore negotiated with. The scholarship supports both readings because its primary function is mapping the terrain rather than prescribing a route across it.
His position at the Naval Postgraduate School also insulates him from pressures that distort think-tank analysis in Washington. He has no donor relationships to manage and no election cycles to track. That buffered identity lets him maintain a reputation for objectivity that more politically exposed analysts struggle to preserve. He produces the raw material, the internal logic of the Iranian state, which more political alliances then shape into policy recommendations.
On Jan. 26, 2026, Ostobar published in Foreign Affairs:

How the Iranian Regime Breaks

Elite Fracture Will Come Gradually and Then Suddenly

…To date, none of the regime’s elites objected to the killings of thousands of innocent civilians by security forces. In fact, figures from across the political spectrum have all outwardly (and falsely) blamed the violence on foreign infiltrators.

If Iran’s elites do move on Khamenei, they will likely act quickly. There will be no sign to outsiders that a coup is coming. And if they succeed, a range of outcomes are possible. The Iranian apparatus has a stark divide between its older and younger generation, and so the character of the next government would depend on which cohort ends up leading it. If the old guard is behind a successful coup, Iran’s next regime will probably remain theocratic at home but become less ambitious abroad. If younger officials take over, Iran will likely grow less religious at home but remain assertive internationally.

Regimes like Iran rarely fall because populations rise up. They fall when elites fracture. The public protests weaken the system, but the decisive moment comes when insiders conclude the leader has become a liability. That mechanism fits the historical pattern of most authoritarian collapses, from Romania to Indonesia under Suharto.
The essay’s most important analytical claim is also its most operational one: the fracture comes gradually and then suddenly. Authoritarian elites hide their doubts until they know others are ready to move. From outside, the system looks unified until the moment it is not. That is why Ostovar stresses that outsiders will likely see no warning. The relevant signals would be subtle: elite families quietly moving abroad, changes in security command structures, IRGC commanders disappearing from public view, unusual troop movements around Tehran. Those are the cues the professional security alliance now watches.
The essay identifies the generational divide inside the IRGC as the most significant fault line. The old guard, veterans of the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, are invested in preserving the system that enriched them. The younger cohort, veterans of regional campaigns in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, are more nationalist and pragmatic, and more blocked by the existing hierarchy. Those generational tensions are historically among the most reliable drivers of elite coups.
Ostovar’s prediction about what a coup actually produces is the part of his analysis most relevant to current policy debates. A coup does not equal a pro-Western democracy. If younger IRGC officers take power, Iran might become less religious domestically but more nationalist and militarily assertive internationally. The analogy he implies is something like post-Mao China: less ideological extremism at home, but still highly ambitious geopolitically. That is a crucial warning for anyone who assumes that regime change in Tehran leads automatically to a liberal outcome.
The hawks in Washington use his collapse logic as analytical cover for the current military campaign, arguing that the February 28 strikes and the death of Khamenei represent the external shock needed to trigger the internal fracture Ostovar described. The restraint faction uses his warnings about prolonged conflict and the absence of a stable successor to argue for limited objectives. The professional military and intelligence community uses his account of the IRGC’s decentralized command structure, with its 32 provincial units designed to survive decapitation strikes, to push back against the assumption that a few well-placed strikes produce a clean outcome.
Ostovar does not argue for any of those positions. He maps the terrain. He explains the internal logic of the Iranian state so that the Western security community can navigate what he calls the logic of collapse. The category he developed, the generational IRGC coup as an institutional survival mechanism rather than a liberal awakening, has become the primary lens through which analysts now interpret the 2026 transition. He did not choose that outcome. He simply drew the map accurately enough that everyone now uses it.