The five major known and unknown factors in Donald Trump’s new war with Iran

More recently, Iran has become a regular adversary in cyberspace — and while it hasn’t quite demonstrated the acuity of Russia or China, Iran is “good at finding ways to maximize the impact of its capabilities,” says Jeff Green, former associate executive director for cybersecurity at CISA. Iran, in particular, is known to have been responsible for a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks on Wall Street institutions that alarmed financial markets, and its 2012 attacks on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s RasGas represented some of the earliest infrastructure-devastating cyber attacks.

Today, of course, Iran is considering which of these tools, networks, and operatives it might use to respond — and where exactly that response might come. Given its history of terrorist campaigns and cyberattacks, there is no reason to believe that Iran’s retaliatory options are limited to missiles alone — or even to the Middle East at all.

Which leads to the biggest unknown ever known:

5. How does this end? There is an apocryphal story about a conversation in the 1970s between Henry Kissinger and a Chinese leader – variously told as either Mao Zedong or Zhou Enlai. When asked about the legacy of the French Revolution, the Chinese leader quipped: “It’s too early to tell.” The story certainly didn’t happen, but it is useful in speaking to a larger truth, especially in societies as old as the 2,500-year-old Persian Empire: history has a long tail.

As much as Trump (and the world) hopes democracy will break out in Iran this spring, the CIA’s official assessment in February was that if Khamenei was killed, he would likely be replaced by hard-line figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Indeed, the fact that Iranian retaliatory strikes against other targets in the Middle East continued throughout Saturday, even after the deaths of several senior regime officials — including the alleged defense minister — belied hope that the government was on the verge of collapse.

To be sure, Iran’s post-World War II history hinges on three moments and their intersections with American foreign policy: the 1953 CIA coup, the 1979 revolution that ousted the Shah, and now the 2026 American attacks that killed the supreme leader. In his latest best-selling book King of kingsAbout the fall of the Shah, longtime foreign correspondent Scott Anderson wrote of 1979, “If one were to make a list of those small handful of revolutions that have catalyzed change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that have caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, we might add to the American, French, and Russian revolutions the Iranian revolution.”

It is hard not to think today that we are living through an equally momentous moment in ways we cannot yet understand or imagine — and that we should be especially wary of any premature celebration or declarations of success given the extent of turmoil Iran has seen in the past.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly bragged about how he sees the military and the Trump administration’s foreign policy as a message to America’s adversaries: “FAFO,” exploiting hackneyed vernacular. However, it is now the United States that is doing the “FA” part of Iran’s skies – and the long arc of Iran’s history tells us that we are a long way from the “FO” part where we understand the consequences.

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