The Adults in the Room Have Left the Building

There is a particular quality of sobriety that comes from men who have actually exercised power, who have sat in rooms where wars were authorised, who have read the intelligence before it was sanitised for public consumption — and who are now watching, from the outside, what happens when none of those disciplines are applied.

That quality filled Friedman Hall at the University of Chicago on 17 April 2026, when the fifth annual Hagel Lecture brought together former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and former Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, moderated by Professor Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. The lecture’s formal title was “America’s Role in Asia: Prospects for Peace and Stability in the Context of War with Iran.” The real subject was something larger and more urgent: the systematic dismantling, in real time, of the world order that the United States built after 1945 — and what that means for every nation that built its security assumptions around it.

Over five thousand people watched the livestream, including members of the US military stationed in the Middle East and across Asia. The hunger for honest analysis, Professor Pape noted, has never been more acute. It is not hard to understand why.

The first warning: this is not ending

Before anything else was discussed, Kurt Campbell made an observation that every government, every central bank, every corporate board assessing supply chain exposure needs to internalise: the war is not ending. Not imminently. Not through tweet. Not through the market optimism that followed each ceasefire announcement.

Campbell was direct on this point, warning against the temptation to believe that each new tweet signals resolution. “We are at the very early stages of the end or the next-last phase of this conflict,” he told the audience. “The diplomacy is really only beginning. The major issues of contestation — what happens to the nuclear material in Iran, the status of the Strait of Hormuz, the nature of the government in Iran, and the relationship between Tehran and the Gulf countries that have been bombed — none of those are anywhere near resolved.” Wikipedia

The Chicago Thinker’s report on the evening captured the precision of Campbell’s warning: he described how Iranian officials witnessed the direct assassination of family members by American-Israeli strikes, and argued that Iran’s new leadership — the son of the slain Supreme Leader, who personally watched his father, mother, brother, wife, and one of his sons die in the strikes — would not be open-minded to close cooperation with the United States on the nuclear question. Al Jazeera

This is not speculation. It is an assessment of the psychological and political reality facing any negotiator who walks into a room with Tehran’s new leadership. The wounds are personal, recent, and not abstract.

Campbell’s warning about market signals deserves to be heard specifically by investors and economists. When oil dropped and equities surged after each ceasefire announcement, the markets were pricing a clean diplomatic resolution. Campbell, who has been part of actual international negotiations with Iran and with other governments in the region, was saying explicitly that those prices were wrong. Professor Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins University, whose economic analysis I wrote about in an earlier piece, made the same point from a different direction: the OMB director, asked under Congressional testimony what the Iran war would cost, said he had no idea. A market that is pricing resolution on the basis of a tweet is pricing on the basis of the same information vacuum that caused the war in the first place.

The world order is “systematically unravelling.” That is Hagel’s phrase.

Secretary Hagel has seen more of American military power than almost any person alive. He fought in Vietnam as an enlisted soldier. He served two terms in the Senate. He was Secretary of Defense. He is the only Vietnam veteran and the only enlisted combat soldier to hold that office. When he speaks about the world order, he speaks from the inside of the system that built it.

What he said at the Hagel Lecture was not the language of a partisan critic. It was the language of someone watching something he helped build come apart.

“This world order that we built with our allies is systematically unravelling,” Hagel told the audience. “That is so damn dangerous. We are essentially isolating ourselves. It is a self-isolation that we are bringing onto ourselves. If there was ever a time when America really needed allies and needed friends, it is certainly now.” Wikipedia

He placed the current moment in historical scale without hedging: when history is written of this period, he said, it will record this as probably the most defining time in the world since World War II. Coming from a man who was born the year after his father returned from the Pacific theatre, this is not casual framing.

The specific diagnosis Hagel offered for the Iran war was three words: “no strategy.” He cited the cover of The Economist from approximately a month before the lecture, which showed a picture of the world blowing up with the headline “A War Without a Strategy.” He drew the direct parallel to Iraq in 2003, where he had sat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and heard the State Department’s own head of intelligence — presenting to the committee, testifying under his own name — say that the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was not good, was not true, that Saddam did not have the weapons or the precursors to build them.

“And it just shows you,” Hagel said, “when a government gets so far off-track that no, we’re going to go no matter what — what a disaster that was. And those three wars — Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan — were not even close to how serious this is.”

The Asia problem that the Middle East has now made much worse

Kurt Campbell spent his career building the strategic architecture that was supposed to prevent exactly this kind of diversion. He helped design the Obama pivot to Asia. He was the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, widely known as the Asia czar. He co-founded the Asia Group, which advises corporations on supply chains and strategic risk across the Pacific. He is, as Professor Pape noted, the principal architect of the US strategy toward China — and that strategy is now being stress-tested by a war he had no hand in starting.

His assessment of the consequences is not optimistic.

“The most likely outcome is that whatever circumstance evolves between the United States and Iran, there will be substantial mistrust,” Campbell told the audience. “Iran’s ability to disrupt commerce and oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz is just a reality now. The United States will have substantial forces stationed semi-permanently in the Middle East. The idea that we would move away from overhang dominance in the Middle East to focus on other things — that strategy is now in serious question.” Wikipedia

This is the Asia problem in its starkest form. For twenty years, the strategic consensus across both US political parties was that the Indo-Pacific — where technology, innovation, climate interdependence, and great-power competition are concentrated — is where the defining history of the 21st century will be written. The resources, the attention, the alliance relationships, the military posture, the diplomatic energy that should be flowing toward that theatre are now being consumed, again, by the Middle East. Campbell noted that it took twenty years to dig out of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and rebalance toward Asia. That rebalancing happened only a few years ago. And now the US is back in the same position, with the same logic, with even larger consequences.

The allies watching all of this from Asia are drawing their own conclusions. Campbell cited what he sees in the region directly: countries that have depended on American extended deterrence and American security guarantees are now quietly rethinking their strategic positioning. Not loudly. Not in press conferences. But in the conversations that happen after the formal meetings end.

Campbell warned that there are ten countries in Asia with the capability to build nuclear weapons that have historically chosen not to. The logic of that restraint rested on confidence in American deterrence and American commitments. That confidence is now in question. “At the end of the Vietnam War,” he observed, “when there were questions about American staying power and determination, several Asian states rethought their nuclear options. I think we are entering a similar moment.” Al Jazeera

Andrei Martyanov, the Russian-American military analyst whose work on precision-strike technology and the limits of American power projection has proven prescient across the past decade, made a related argument in his writing that predates this war: the diffusion of precision-strike capabilities creates a multipolar military environment in which American deterrence in forward-deployed positions becomes structurally untenable. Iran’s forty-day demonstration has now run that argument in live conditions against the world’s most advanced military. Every government in Asia watched. Every defence ministry has drawn its own conclusions.

The alliance damage: worse than the optics suggest

Perhaps the most revealing anecdote of the entire evening came from Campbell’s description of a lunch he had with Denmark’s ambassador to the United States. Denmark is not a peripheral actor in the NATO story — it is one of the twelve founding members of the alliance, a country that has supported every major American military engagement since 1949, including Iraq and Afghanistan, even when those engagements were deeply unpopular.

At this lunch, the ambassador asked Campbell to put his phone in a safe before they spoke. The reason: Denmark is now “constantly prepared for a military invasion of Greenland” and considers conversations near American devices a potential intelligence risk.

Campbell described this to the audience with a candour that was striking: “If we were having the Hagel Lecture last year and someone said get ready, because we’re going to be thinking about invading Greenland, that person would not be invited back. And literally, he is talking to me as if our old ally — if you want to go into a fight, you want a country like Denmark by your side — is actually looking at the United States as a potential hostile nation.” Wikipedia

This is not a problem that a diplomatic apology tour resolves. Campbell warned the audience directly about this: whoever is tasked with rebuilding American alliances after this period will need to be enormously patient. European partners will not say “welcome back.” They will lecture for hours about how they were let down, how they had no consultation before the war, how they were scolded when they refused to participate, how they were demanded to commit on terms they did not understand.

“Everything that the United States has ever done of consequence on the global stage until today, we have done with Europe,” Campbell stated. “Everything.” Wikipedia

Hagel made the related point about trust in the broader international system. The coin of the realm in international relations, he said, is trust. The post-WWII world order was built on it. America could be trusted. Partners could trust each other. The entire system of mutual interest — imperfect, but functional for eighty years — was built on that foundation. And now: “We’ve lost some of it, and it’s just not going to go back.”

Al Jazeera’s analysis of the war from the perspective of international law, published in March 2026, placed this alliance fracture in its broader context: the conflict, described by Al Jazeera as “aggressively and illegally imposed” in violation of the UN Charter, has not only disrupted diplomatic relations but “challenged the foundations of international law” and the multilateral institutions that the post-war order was built upon. When the United States ignores Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, it does not just violate a legal provision. It removes the legal architecture that smaller states depend on for their sovereignty. Every country watching understands this. Every country is drawing conclusions.

Iran’s enriched uranium: the nuclear question nobody has answered

Professor Pape, who has been wargaming Iran scenarios for over two decades and who in the weeks before the lecture was receiving more questions from military personnel about this subject than almost any other, raised what may be the most consequential unresolved question of the entire conflict: what happens if the war ends with Iran still holding enriched uranium at or near weapons-grade levels?

Campbell’s answer was careful but unambiguous. Iran had the capability to build a nuclear weapon for a substantial period of time before the war and chose not to. Something has now changed in that calculation. The new Supreme Leader, Mostafa Khamenei, was present when the strikes killed his father, mother, brother, wife, and one of his sons. He has IRGC relationships forged in combat during the Iran-Iraq war. He is not the pragmatist diplomat. And the institutional logic has shifted.

Campbell stated that he believes Iran will “try to resurrect that program” — the nuclear weapons program — and that there will not be as many institutional or international safeguards in place to stop it as there were before the war. Ambassador Chas Freeman, in a separate analysis, was even more direct: the new Supreme Leader is a combat veteran who fought in three major battles at seventeen years old, who forged his relationships with the IRGC in live fire, and who has now watched the US and Israel kill his entire immediate family. Expecting him to be more accommodating on nuclear weapons than his father is, as Freeman put it, “a difficult argument to make.” Al Jazeera

The proliferation consequences that flow from this are not contained to Iran. Campbell observed that every nuclear restraint in Asia was built on a foundation of confidence in American extended deterrence and non-proliferation commitments. That foundation has been visibly weakened. When South Korea, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, and other states in the region observe that a country the United States attacked for its nuclear programme now has more reason than ever to accelerate that programme, the lesson they draw about their own security calculations shifts.

Hagel’s comment on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — the JCPOA — was measured fury. He helped build it. He gave speeches defending it. He watched it produce, for the first time in the history of US-Iran relations, a framework where American inspectors could work inside Iran alongside IAEA inspectors. “It was an imperfect deal,” he said, “but it did the things we needed to do. It was a smart way to handle this.” Someone asked him at the time: what about after fifteen years, when the deal expires? He gave the answer that any honest strategist would give: if you are so smart, you tell me what the world looks like in fifteen years. I will take fifteen years of peace.

The deal was torn up by Trump in 2018. Eight years later, the US launched a war it cannot win to address the nuclear programme that the deal had constrained.

China: the early winner that nobody in Washington wants to name

Campbell did not hedge on China. He has spent his career studying it, negotiating with it, and building the American strategy designed to manage its rise. His assessment at the Hagel Lecture was not what his former colleagues in Washington’s foreign policy establishment would prefer to hear.

“Anyone who is underestimating China is making a major mistake,” he told the audience. “In almost all areas — electric cars, photovoltaics, every kind of new-age technology — the United States trails China badly, very badly. They are likely to be the big energy winners going forward.” He described China’s investments in clean energy and new technologies as categorically surpassing American equivalents, a result of consistent long-term investment that successive US administrations have first matched, then abandoned. Wikipedia

He also described a reality that Russian oil exports confirm directly: Indonesia’s President Prabowo, who signed a Major Defense Cooperation Partnership with the United States on the same day the naval blockade was announced, simultaneously praised Putin’s role in supplying Indonesia with oil and gas during the crisis. Russia is selling at premium prices, not discounts. Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, India — all of them are pivoting, not dramatically, but at the margins, in ways that compound over time.

Michael Hudson, the economist and author of Super Imperialism, has argued for decades that American financial power rests on controlling oil priced in dollars flowing through chokepoints that Washington commands. The Iran war has now placed an Iranian-controlled toll on one of the most important of those chokepoints. If that toll is formalised — if the Montreux Convention model that Professor Hanke raised in his conversation with Mario Nawfal is applied to Hormuz, with Iran managing the strait under an international framework the way Turkey manages the Bosphorus — the structural architecture of dollar hegemony changes. Not catastrophically, not overnight, but persistently, and in China’s direction.

The manufacturing of the next generation of threats

The final point Hagel made deserves to be stated plainly because it is the one that will be least discussed in the coming months and most consequential in the coming decade.

Every day that bombing continues in Lebanon, in Iran, in Gaza — every charred body pulled from rubble, every family that watches its children die under air strikes — produces a generation of people for whom the United States and Israel represent not democracy or freedom but organised, technologically superior murder.

“What’s been happening over there is the manufacturing of new terrorists,” Hagel said. “New, young terrorists are coming out of all this — seeing their parents and their children bombed in front of them and massacred in front of them. Do you think they are going to be amenable to cooperation? In that part of the world especially, where the history has been so volatile, there are consequences for every action.”

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has documented this dynamic across three successive reports. The cycle of dispossession, violence, and collective punishment does not produce compliance. It produces resistance, in the next generation, in forms that no military force can permanently suppress. The historical record across the past century is unambiguous on this point. Hagel saw it in Vietnam. He saw it in Iraq. He is watching it happen again, at a scale that dwarfs all three of those earlier misadventures combined.

What they left unsaid — and what needs to be said

The Hagel Lecture was convened at a university, moderated by a scholar, and attended by people who believe in the power of knowledge and honest analysis. Its participants were careful to stay within the bounds of what former officials say publicly. But the implications of everything they said are not difficult to draw out.

The world order that prevented World War III for eighty years is under structural stress from which it cannot fully recover, regardless of how the Iran ceasefire talks proceed. The non-proliferation architecture that kept most of Asia nuclear-free is facing challenges that no diplomatic communiqué can resolve. The alliance system that made American power globally projectable is fractured in ways that will require years of patient repair — and may not be fully repairable. The strategic pivot to Asia that was supposed to define US foreign policy for a generation has been disrupted, again, by the Middle East. And the economic consequences of the Hormuz closure — oil, LNG, fertiliser, helium, maritime insurance, shipping confidence — are radiating through the global system in ways that will not resolve when someone signs a three-page memorandum of understanding in Islamabad.

Campbell ended on a note that reflected both the weight of what had been discussed and a determination not to surrender to despair. Most of American history, he reminded the audience, is marked by struggle, by enormous effort to build something better in the face of forces pushing in the other direction. The people who built what America became before this moment did it through difficulty, not despite it.

That is the optimism available right now. Not the optimism of the tweet that says the war is over. The harder, more durable optimism of people who have done the work, who understand what is at stake, and who are not pretending that what is happening is anything other than what it is.

Chuck Hagel, who fought in Vietnam and came home, who watched the Iraq war begin on a lie and spoke against it when it mattered, put it in the plainest terms he could: “Easy to get into wars. Pretty damn hard to get out.”

The evidence of seven weeks has not contradicted him.