Mutually Assured Causation
Iran, Somalia, and Syria and the Limits of Linear Thinking
There is always a moment during a theory of change workshop when someone questions whether an outcome causes another outcome or is caused by it, or whether they simply arise together, each conditioning the other. I always encourage people to think carefully about that question. Understanding the theory behind the change you are trying to make matters. But I also tell them not to get too hung up on it. We are building an abstraction, a map and not the territory itself. The map only matters insofar as it can explain the territory and help you find a path to where you want to go.
I have been thinking about that a lot last week with the situation in Iran.
Last Wednesday I wrote about US-China AI competition and what it looks like to make policy inside a web of mutual causality, conditions shaping conditions, no single arrow from here to stable outcome. On Thursday and Friday I wrote about Anthropic and the Pentagon and what happens when a government demands the removal of written limits on its own power (linked below). On Saturday night, while those pieces were still circulating, the United States and Israel killed Ali Khamenei.
The arrow landed. What it landed in had already been changed by the fact that the arrow was coming.
I have worked on evaluations of programs in places like Somalia. By the time an evaluation begins, the theory of change is already built, already funded, already implemented. My job was to ask whether that theory was a valid map that actually explained the territory.
It didn’t in the case of that Somalia program. Not fully. It never does. It can’t.
The Vacuum
To understand what is likely to happen in Iran, it helps to look at what happened in Somalia in the early 1990s, after the removal of its leader.
The United States supported Siad Barre for over a decade because he countered Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa. When the Cold War ended that strategic interest evaporated and the United States withdrew. No transition plan. No peacekeeping. No sustained effort to build the institutional conditions that might have allowed something stable to emerge.
What followed was not simply a vacancy waiting to be filled. The removal changed the clan dynamics that had been suppressed under Barre. Those shifting dynamics changed the militia calculus. The militia consolidation changed what the subsequent humanitarian intervention landed in. The intervention changed the conflict it was trying to relieve. Each of those changes was conditioning the others simultaneously, producing outcomes that no single arrow in any direction could have predicted or tracked.
A linear model can be extended. You can draw more arrows: remove the leader, vacuum forms, new leadership emerges, stability follows. But the problem is not the length of the chain. The problem is that the chain cannot hold what was actually happening, which was not a sequence but a reorganization. Outputs were becoming inputs. Outcomes were shaping other outcomes. The system was not moving toward a stable end state. It was reorganizing continuously around every perturbation, including the perturbation the intervention itself introduced. It’s a whole system. It’s really more of a web than a chain.
This is what mutual causation means in practice. Not that things are complicated. Not that there were unintended consequences. But that the model being used to justify the intervention was structurally incapable of seeing what the intervention was producing, because it could not hold the loops.
The window that opened after Barre’s fall closed with the militias inside it. What got cemented in that window was very hard to undo. It produced the famine, the failed state, the ongoing humanitarian crisis, and eventually the diaspora in Minneapolis that I wrote about in January. None of that was inevitable.
What Happens After
Syria is the case that shows what happens after. Not during the intervention, not at the moment of removal, but in the years that follow when the vacuum has to be filled with something.
Assad fell in December 2024. Not because Western intervention worked, but because the external actors propping him up, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, had been so weakened by the events of 2024 and 2025 that they could no longer hold the system together. The Syrian army stopped fighting. The regime collapsed from exhaustion and abandonment. Assad fled to Russia.
The initial euphoria was real. Syrians had endured over fifty years of dynastic dictatorship and thirteen years of civil war. The opening of Sednaya prison, where thousands had been tortured and killed, was a moment of genuine historical weight.
But the vacuum did not wait for the euphoria to settle. What filled it was Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS, the most organized and militarily disciplined force in the opposition. HTS had al-Qaeda origins. It had been governing Idlib for years, running a conservative administration that gave it administrative experience no other opposition faction had. It was not the most representative force. It was the most ready one.
A year later HTS controls the key ministries, including defense, foreign affairs, and justice. The constitutional declaration signed in March 2025 grants the interim president sweeping executive authority for five years. Sectarian violence has erupted against Alawite and Druze communities. The window of democratic possibility that opened in December 2024 is visibly closing. What began as a transitional government is consolidating into something that looks increasingly like institutionalized HTS dominance.
This is what mutual causation looks like across a longer time horizon. The thirteen years of intervention and counter-intervention, with the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar backing different factions while Russia and Iran backed Assad, reorganized the Syrian opposition so thoroughly that when the regime finally fell, what emerged reflected the accumulated logic of all those competing forces. The people who rose up in 2011 with demands for dignity and democracy got something. It is not what they rose up for.
And into this window, at exactly the moment when sustained external support for institution building and civil society might have mattered most, USAID was dismantled. We cannot know precisely what that support would have looked like or whether it would have been sufficient. What we can say is that the infrastructure the United States would typically have moved into a transitional window was not there. The organizations that would have provided reconstruction funding, democracy promotion, civil society support, and technical assistance to a fragile new government were gone. The window opened. The United States was not in it, at least not in the ways that might have supported something more accountable than what is consolidating now.
Russia and Iran did not win in Syria. But they extracted what they needed for years before losing their investment. And what was left when they withdrew was a vacuum shaped by their presence, filled by whoever was most organized, closing around a new consolidation of power that Syrians who rose up in 2011 did not ask for and cannot easily undo.
The window opened. It is already closing. That is the pattern.
The Window Right Now
Khamenei was killed yesterday morning in a joint United States and Israeli military operation. The strikes targeted a compound in Tehran where senior Iranian officials had gathered. Among the dead: the IRGC commander, the defense minister, the chief of staff of the armed forces, and multiple senior intelligence commanders. A provisional leadership council formed within hours, comprising the president, the judiciary chief, and a senior cleric from the Guardian Council.
By Saturday evening the IRGC had launched strikes on 27 American military bases across the region. Explosions were reported in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE. A missile struck a synagogue in Beit Shemesh. Saudi Arabia began shooting down Iranian missiles over its territory. Iran closed its airspace. Trump threatened strikes of a force never seen before. Iran’s president called revenge a legitimate right and duty. The IRGC vowed to continue the path of their leader. Mourning crowds gathered in Tehran. Celebration crowds gathered in other parts of the same city. Both at the same time.
Every one of those things is now influencing every other thing simultaneously.
The strikes decapitated the security leadership but did not destroy the institution. What that produces may be more dangerous than what existed before. The clerical leadership structure imposed a layer of political constraint on the military, a body above the security apparatus that had to weigh diplomatic and domestic consequences before acting. That layer is now gone. Field commanders are operating without it. The Al Jazeera analysis published this morning said plainly that Iran learned from the June 2025 war that restraint is interpreted as weakness. The scorched earth logic the security apparatus used against its own people in January, when it killed tens of thousands of protesters in the first days of the uprising, is now the logic being applied outward. That is not a weakened state. It is a state whose internal brutality has been externalized, with nothing above it left to impose limits.
That is what is happening inside Iran. What is happening around it is its own web.
Russia, China, and North Korea have spent the past several years building what analysts now call the CRINK alignment, a loose coordination among those four states based on a shared interest in challenging the existing international order. Iran supplied Russia with drones for use in Ukraine. It joined BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. It signed a twenty year strategic partnership with Russia in January 2025. The relationship looked, from the outside, like a bloc.
But when Israel struck Iran in June 2025 the bloc did not hold. Russia and China offered condemnation and called for a ceasefire. They did not send weapons. Russia reportedly refused a direct Iranian request for drones. At a major gathering in Beijing in September 2025 Iran appeared peripheral, described by one analyst as receiving a participation trophy while North Korea was ascendant.
History suggests what comes next. External actors who positioned themselves as partners during Iran’s strength will now position themselves around Iran’s need. They will not fill the vacuum. They will extract from it. Russian interest is in Iranian drone technology, oil markets, and a Middle Eastern pressure point that ties down American attention and resources. Chinese interest is in Iranian oil and expanded institutional influence. What serves both is an Iran capable enough to threaten the West and dependent enough to need their support. An Iran that achieves genuine self-determination is less useful to them than an Iran suspended at the threshold.
The nuclear question sits underneath all of this. Iran’s foreign minister said before the strikes that the country had reconstructed everything damaged in the June 2025 war. Whether yesterday’s strikes reached the nuclear infrastructure is not yet fully known. What is known is that every actor now circling this window has a position on Iranian nuclear capacity. The United States and Israel want elimination. Russia and China want managed capability. The IRGC, now operating without clerical oversight, may want something else entirely. The provisional council is trying to form a government inside all of that, simultaneously, today.
In January, Iranians rose up across all thirty one provinces. They were massacred. Then the country was bombed. They are still there, living inside conditions that are now changing faster than any map can follow.
Mutually Assured Causation
There is a concept that came out of the US Army War College after the Cold War ended. They called it VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. It was the military’s own acknowledgment that the environment they were operating in could not be planned for with straight lines. Cause and effect were no longer separable. Intentions could not be fully read. Actions produced reactions that produced counter-reactions in loops no single actor could control. They built the concept because they had watched linear thinking fail in real time and needed language for why.
That concept exists. It was available. The people who planned yesterday’s operation had access to it.
There is also a reason the Cold War produced the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. It was the recognition, arrived at through near catastrophe, that linear thinking about nuclear capable states is not just wrong. It is existential. The logic of strike and control, remove the head and direct what follows, was tested against the reality of a system that would respond, whose response could not be contained, whose response would produce a counter-response in a loop that no one could stop once it started. MAD was not a counsel of despair. It was the grudging acknowledgment that some systems cannot be treated as passive objects. That action and consequence are not separable. That what you do to a system changes what the system does to you.
That recognition is now being tested in Iran. Not as a thought experiment. As a live operation, expanding by the hour, with field commanders freed from political constraint, a provisional council trying to form a government under bombardment, Russia and China calculating what the wreckage is worth to them, and a nuclear question that nobody has answered and everybody is now racing to shape.
This is a VUCA environment. It was a VUCA environment before the first strike landed. The Iranians who rose up in January knew it. They lived in it. They understood that removing Khamenei would not produce a straight line to liberation because they could see the security apparatus, the regional powers, the factional interests, the decades of accumulated grievance that would all rush into any absence. They asked for something different. They were massacred. Then the country was bombed.
In Somalia the vacuum filled with militias. In Syria it filled with the most organized faction available. In Iran it is filling right now, with everything influencing everything else simultaneously, in conditions that no map drawn before the strikes fully accounts for.
Nobody who drew the diagram is living in it.
Anthralytic is a strategy and evaluation studio that helps mission-driven teams clarify and amplify their impact. We bring warm skepticism to questions of accountability, asking not just whether programs work but whose interests they serve.
