Synopsis: Iran’s president spent some of his scarcest hours in New York with the analysts and journalists who draft Washington’s options, rather than with the officials who choose between them. This essay follows that choice upstream, to think tanks funded by arms manufacturers and Gulf governments, whose papers rehearsed a war that came this year and missed its outcome. It gives Tehran no easier ride than the forecasters, then turns the lens on foresight itself.
Late in September 2026, in a Manhattan hotel, Iran’s president sat down with the people who write about him on a daily basis. Seven months earlier he had been feared dead. On the morning of 28 February, as waves of American and Israeli strikes broke over Tehran, Masoud Pezeshkian vanished for hours; the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, did not survive that day. Now Pezeshkian had addressed the General Assembly, and the United States Secret Service was escorting his foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, along Manhattan’s avenues. Across the table from the president sat Western journalists and analysts from the institutions whose papers had, for the better part of a generation, rehearsed the war his country was now living through.
His critics at home had told him New York was no place for smiles. Newspapers close to the Revolutionary Guard argued he should never have boarded the plane. He went anyway. Among the hours he chose to spend in America were these, with the people who draft the agenda from which officials choose rather than the officials who would sign or refuse a settlement.
Anyone who has observed public policy being made in the US understands that key decisions are shaped in advance and behind the scenes. By the time ministers convene, the options have been written and costed. The unthinkable has been removed from the page. That drafting happens upstream, in a compact cluster of Washington think tanks. They frame the terms of debate, supply the testimony, and lend the fellows who later take government posts to implement what they once recommended — and then return. Pezeshkian’s staff appear to have read that environment accurately. Choosing the analysts was a reading of where the future gets written.
The money trail is well documented. Between 2019 and 2023, the hundred largest defence firms gave more than US$34.7 million to America’s fifty leading foreign-policy think tanks, and foreign governments gave over US$110 million. The United Arab Emirates was the most generous of those governments, and the Atlantic Council collected more foreign-government money than any other recipient. An update this March added 2024 and widened the pool to seventy-five think tanks: around US$25 million from foreign governments, US$7 million from Pentagon contractors, and roughly two in five disclosing nothing at all. The Atlantic Council had brought in a visiting fellow from the Israeli security establishment to write about Iran. Less than a fortnight before the February strikes, he published the case for choosing the military option.
None of this convicts any individual scholar. I have no doubt these houses contain real differences of opinion. Some of their analysts opposed the invasion of Iraq and defended the nuclear deal, and restraint-minded shops can and do operate inside the same ecosystem. But dependence sets the boundary of what can and cannot be said before any research begins. Rarely will an institution that depends on arms manufacturers and Gulf treasuries publish a paper concluding that regional stability requires American withdrawal. Nobody has to be instructed. The perimeter just draws itself.
In 2000, the Project for the New American Century treated Iraq as the proximate reason for a permanent American force in the Gulf, while making clear that the need for that presence outlived Saddam. Two years earlier, its open letter to Clinton had asked for his removal — more than three years before 9/11 supplied the occasion. In 2009, a Brookings study laid out coercive routes to Tehran. Its authors observed that force would be far easier to justify abroad if Iran were first seen to spurn a generous offer. That remark about the manufacture of legitimacy reads differently after this year. In 2019, RAND catalogued ways to overextend Russia, among them leaving the INF Treaty — a step Washington had announced the previous autumn and completed that summer. Study and policy were running in parallel, each lending the other confidence. Across decades and letterheads, the options cluster around the preservation of primacy, and their authors rotate through government, industry and back again.
A much more strident version of this argument presently in circulation turns funding tables into a secret plan and the analysts into puppets of some grander conspiracy. That version is a gift to the think tanks it attacks. It lets them dismiss the arithmetic along with the paranoia.
For twenty years the hawkish consensus issued confident forecasts: sanctions would break the economy, citizens would rise up. Neither came to pass. Then, this year, the forecasters got the war many of them had rehearsed on paper. The leader was killed, the ports were blockaded, the nuclear sites were struck again. Seven months on, Iran still stands. Hormuz has become Tehran’s lever, and Washington negotiates through Qatari intermediaries and presidential envoys.
Survival and strength are different conditions, though, and conflating them is Tehran’s talking point. Hezbollah is badly degraded. Assad’s government is gone. For the time being Hamas is shattered. The economy is being strangled by blockade, and ordinary households, not the state, absorb the rial’s collapse and the steady departure of the professional class. Iran’s own story frays under the same scrutiny. Sixty-percent enrichment serves no civilian programme, and on the eve of this trip, hardline MPs filed a bill to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. A government that killed its own citizens for protesting in 2022 makes an unconvincing vessel for the grievances of the Global South, however well its president performs in New York.
And he did perform well. The vow at the podium never to bow down was written for Tehran. The hotel session was written for Washington. Both were immaculate stagecraft. The meeting was a scene in the play.
What has changed is the direction of travel. For seventy years briefing-paper orthodoxy moved one way, from a handful of well-endowed think tanks outward to government and press. That pipeline still works, but it now competes with media ecosystems outside the Atlantic orbit, with leaders speaking straight to their audiences, and with a policy community across Asia, Africa and Latin America that reads establishment reports the way sceptics read press releases. When an Iranian president decides that some of his most valuable hours in America belong to analysts and reporters, he is disclosing where he believes influence over the future now sits.
Whether the incumbents adapt is open to conjecture. Their record on the Middle East is poor, their funding is increasingly visible, and their authority is thinning among the younger cohorts who will staff future administrations. Against that stand money and the revolving door, both formidable at restoring equilibrium. If the gap between prediction and outcome keeps widening, on Iran and on Russia, the market for policy ideas should splinter, and influence should drift toward heterodox and non-Western shops. If the establishment manages to absorb its failures into a new story about itself, the hotel session will survive as a footnote.
Foresight — the discipline this publication practises — lives in precisely this upstream layer. Anticipatory scenarios, option menus, the subtle decision about which futures appear on the slide and which are left off: this is the same drafting work, done with better manners and much smaller budgets. Every adviser who has briefed a cabinet knows the moment when a possibility becomes plausible simply because it appeard on a Powerpoint deck. It’s then that plausibility hardens into momentum. The scriptwriters are not only in Washington.