Welcome to the inaugural issue of NZNet Digest, a (more or less) weekly collection of highlights from NonZero Network member newsletters, and from a few other notable Substacks as well. Paid subscribers to the NonZero Newsletter can get a 50 percent discount on an annual subscription to any NZNet member newsletter. (Note: In a departure from the norm, comments are open to all, not just paid NZN subscribers. Feel free to share any reactions to the NZNet Digest format—and for that matter to anything else.)
Amid reports that the son of assassinated Iranian leader Ali Khamenei is the frontrunner to succeed him, Derek Davison explains what such a succession would signal about the future direction of the government. Though any successor would likely “serve more as an enabler/figurehead for an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-run system than as an active head of state,” writes Davison, the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei “would effectively amount to a full (or fuller) IRGC takeover of the state. This is not a choice that would endear the Islamic Republic to Iranians who have soured on it, as Mojtaba is not a particularly public or popular figure and the symbolism of turning the supreme leader office into an inherited monarchy is unlikely to go over well.”
Derek’s daily roundups of world events are especially valuable during times of unfolding crisis or conflict.
What is Trump’s endgame in Iran? Dalia Dassa Kaye of UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations suggests that one approach to answering this question is to imagine an ending that Trump would like to see in his authorized biography. Appearing on Mark Leon Goldberg’s Global Dispatches podcast, Kaye said:
Given this is his second term, his age, and so forth, it looks like he’s really looking at these legacy issues. So it’s like: I did Venezuela, I did Iran, Cuba’s in the mix. So what is he willing to live with that can say, ‘I really did something with Iran that nobody else did.’… And if he could say, “Look, it’s killing the leadership. It’s killing the supreme leader, the symbol of the revolution. And whatever comes after, you know, they may say they’re still the Islamic Republic, but they’re just a shell of their former self… America won.
But, added Kaye, “I don’t think the Israelis will be perfectly comfortable” with ending things there. Two days after she spoke, it looks like Trump, too, may hope for something beyond regime decapitation. Which leads to our next item:
With US-Israeli strikes targeting Iran’s policing infrastructure, and Trump reportedly working to foster a Kurdish insurrection in Iran’s north, the collapse of government authority increasingly seems to be a war aim shared by the US and Israel. In a podcast conversation taped shortly before the war, Middle East expert Joshua Landis, drawing on recent Syrian history, suggested that many Iranians may be too sanguine about the prospects for avoiding civil war in the event of a power vacuum:
All my Syrian friends before 2011 swore to me—I would always say, “Do you really want revolution? You’re going to be like Iraq. It’s going to fall apart. Its emulous factions and people are going to start killing each other. It’s too scary to contemplate.” And they would say, “No, Josh, you don’t understand. We’re not like Iraq.” We are, you know, we’re a bourgeois nation and the urban elites are blah, blah, blah, blah. It was not true. So I distrust my Iranian friends who say, we’re a nation and we’re going to stick together. And we just saw last week, to underline this anxiety, that there were big demonstrations on some university campuses in Iran against the Islamic Republic authorities, but then the counter demonstrations and students came out and clashed with them who are pro regime. And, you know, it’s easy to try to dismiss those students as just rent-an-opposition type thing or rented loyalists, but I think these countries are deeply divided.
China is outmatching everyone on drones and batteries and many other technological fronts, and a lot of Americans are scared about that—probably more scared than they should be, according to Kyle Chan of the Brookings Institution. Appearing on the Sinica Podcast, Chan told host Kaiser Kuo that China’s gain isn’t automatically America’s loss, because the two systems remain, even amid political tension, deeply intertwined:
CHAN: Continued progress in technology development means that a lot of engineers, a lot of developers, a lot of companies—they are looking to partner with the best out there … For example, Google’s Waymo, the robotaxi service, is using Zeekr electric vehicles from China’s Geely. And there I think the argument is, those Chinese EVs are a cost-effective, highly reliable, scalable platform to use, and then Waymo can add their own sort of autonomous vehicle systems on top of that … As China continues to move up the technology ladder, as Chinese companies continue to move up the value chain, we’re going to see those forces pulling [the US and China] together even more.
Some people worry that a coming AI-enabled utopia could, by satisfying all human craving, leave our lives devoid of meaning. Small Potatoes author Paul Bloom says they’ve got it all wrong. Even if we get everything we want materially, Bloom argues, we can never get everything we want socially:
Scarcity generates pleasure, anxiety, and purpose. But a world that is post-scarcity in the sense that there is more than enough material resources for everyone will still have another form of scarcity—people’s respect, admiration, attention, desire, and love. The bad news about a post-scarcity utopia is that we will still be unhappy much of the time. The good news is that our lives will still have meaning.
That Anthropic has decided to rewrite–and, some would say, abandon–the safety protections laid out in what it calls its “Responsible Scaling Policy” is a sure sign we need tougher AI safety regulation, writes Shakeel Hasim:
The original RSP articulated a clear principle that should guide all AI development: we will not build what we cannot confidently make safe. That principle is dead, and what remains is an admission that voluntary commitments simply won’t work … [Voluntary commitments] were supposed to create the political capital for governments to step in and force all companies to meet a baseline level of safety and security. That has not happened. Instead, the frontier developer ostensibly most committed to building safe AI is admitting that even it can’t be trusted to do so. We can only hope that exposing the futility of such commitments makes the case for measures that can’t so easily be discarded.
What happens within powerful institutions when common dissenting beliefs on contentious political topics–over, say, affirmative action or gender-affirming care for teens—get treated as moral abominations? According to Glenn Loury, who offered his thoughts during a recent lecture at Stanford, the moderate voices begin to self-censor, leaving the field to extreme views on both sides… Loury calls such censorship the inevitable product of “incentives, information, and equilibrium behavior”:
When reputational penalties attach to certain conclusions, the people most likely to speak are either those insulated from the penalties or those who reject the moral premises of the audience altogether. Extremes become over-represented. The cautious, empirically minded middle withdraws. This is not because moderate views vanish, but because they are priced out of public expression. This process of adverse selection … can be self-reinforcing. Once some people suppress their views, others update their beliefs about what can safely be said, and the perceived reputational risk of expressing those views increases. Silence begets silence.
What the attacks on Iran and the recent blacklisting of Anthropic by the Pentagon have in common, argues Noah Millman, is an indifference to rulebooks. Millman believes the resulting precedents are dire and durable. The point of having the government abide by the law, writes Millman, “is to foster trust generally, not only of the state but between people who don’t know each other.” He continues:
When you move outside the realm of law and trust, and into the realm of power and fear, that’s no longer really possible. So regardless of whether the war in Iran “works out” in the sense of leading to at least a somewhat less terrible regime there and minimal American and allied casualties, and even if the sanctions against Anthropic “work out” in the sense that the company isn’t driven out of business and the Pentagon doesn’t wind up powering up Skynet—even if we avoid the worst, we’re entering a new world.
Peter Beinart cites the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunal in arguing that the US-Israeli attack on Iran constitutes “the supreme international crime”—but the crime he’s talking about isn’t the one we typically associate with Nuremberg. In a video op-ed, Beinart says:
We think now of Nuremberg as having put Nazi leaders on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity and those evils. But in fact what the tribunal said was that the crime of aggression was, quote, “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” There was a time when leading Americans saw attacks on countries that did not threaten them as the core evil in the world, because it unleashed so many other evils. It was what they associated with the evil of the Nazis’ unprovoked attacks in Poland, in France, in the Low Countries. They associated it with the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. It was considered fundamentally immoral and fundamentally un-American. And now this is the world that Israel and the United States are bringing us towards.
Carnegie fellow Ankit Panda argues that Iran took a “catastrophic approach to deterrence” that wound up emboldening its adversaries:
The U.S. intelligence community repeatedly assessed through 2025 that Iran had not decided to build a weapon. Khamenei’s fatwa [against the development or use of nuclear weapons] was cited by Iranian officials as proof of restraint. But this very restraint, which was intended to signal responsibility, was read by adversaries as a signal that Iran could be struck before it weaponized. Iran had, in effect, constructed the worst possible nuclear posture: close enough to a bomb to justify preventive attack, yet unwilling to cross the threshold that might have actually deterred one.
Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.
Nearly all the critical comment I've seen about the Iran war has been vulgarly pragmatic. "We don't know who will take over." "They might hit back." "We're two trillion dollars in debt already." In one form or another: "Will it succeed? Will we get what we want?" Robert, you're one of the few commentators I would expect at least to entertain the question: "Maybe obeying international law is a good idea? Maybe a habit of obeying international law would make the resort to force by any nation anytime less likely, which would not only save many a headache but might actually, in the long run, prevent a civilization-destroying conflagration? Remember the long run?" I find it unspeakably discouraging that I can't find this perspective, even on the left.