The Existential Matrix: Trump, Netanyahu, and Iran Face known and Unknown Unknowns
Breakfast With Bwana
By Anil Madan
Ever since the Islamic Revolution that vaulted Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979, his chants of “Death to America,” and “Death to the Zionist Pigs” filled the air. His successor, and undoubtedly the successor’s son who has been anointed as the next iteration of Supreme Leaders, echoed his exhortations. How seriously should threats seemingly existential in import be taken? Do they require a pre-emptive blow, or would a retaliatory response suffice? We know of the funding and support of proxies in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Yemen. We know of the supply of drones to Russia and perhaps of nuclear weapons know-how to North Korea.
In choosing a retaliatory response, recognition of the threat as existential necessarily means that one is playing Russian Roulette. And this time, with Russia firmly on the other side and perhaps in a position to influence whose number is up when the steel ball lands, that gamble is best avoided.
Twenty-four years ago, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State in President George W, Bush’s administration was asked about the uncertainty of the evidence, or more accurately lack of evidence, linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. Rumsfeld responded:
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”
Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler in The Decision Book: Fifty Models for Strategic Thinking characterized this as the Rumsfeld Matrix, a strategic 2×2 framework used to manage uncertainty by categorizing knowledge into four quadrants.
The Four Quadrants
* Known Knowns (Things we know we know): These are facts, data, and experiences that provide a solid basis for decisions.
* Known Unknowns (Things we know we don’t know): Risks and gaps in knowledge that we are aware of, requiring research or expert consultation.
* Unknown Knowns (Things we know but forget): Tacit knowledge, ignored information, or unconscious biases that, when uncovered, can lead to breakthroughs.
* Unknown Unknowns (Things we don’t know we don’t know): Unpredictable “black swan” events or, unforeseen risks that can disrupt plans and require high flexibility.
This time, we see that Israel and America, have chosen a pre-emptive blow. The overwhelmingly clear intention is to end, once for all, the existential threat to Israel. Next level intentions include establishing security and stability across the Middle East for the Gulf nations (necessarily ensuring that American bases in these countries are not attacked), compromising Russia’s influence in the region and Putin’s access to Iranian drones, interrupting the progress of Chinese-Iranian solidarity, and perhaps replacing the theocratic regime with something more palatable, or at least weakening it so much that its dying embers do not singe Israeli and American interests.
But we are nevertheless left twisting the sides of a Rubik’s Cube rendition of the Rumsfeld Matrix, as the solid-colour logic of each face is disrupted by discordant colours that do not fit.
Trump’s different justifications for attacking Iran
On Wednesday, March 11, 2026, President Trump held a brief, five-minute telephone interview with the news outlet Axios, during which he stated that the war in Iran will end soon because there is “practically nothing left to target.” He added: “Any time I want it to end, it will end.” Was he declaring a known known, or merely obliviousness to what is unknown?
One known known, the reason for the war in the first place, often renders as an unknown unknown. History teaches us that humans often invade first, justify later. President Trump has given us different justifications for attacking Iran. What we don’t know is whether those reasons were known to him before the attack or came to him after. What we do know is that unlike George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, he did not sell the adventure to the American public or to America’s allies. Why? We can only speculate — our guesses falling somewhere between known unknowns and unknowable unknowns.
On that same March 11, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the war will continue “without any time limit, for as long as necessary, until we achieve all the objectives and decisively win the campaign.” Axios reported that Israeli and US officials said they were preparing for at least two more weeks of strikes in Iran. Note that Katz did not specify the objectives nor suggest how we should calibrate to recognize a “decisive” win. Is there any settling for a less than decisive win? Does President Trump’s statement that the war will end when he wants it to end suggest this is a possibility?
Who will win the war?
The true greatest unknown unknowns of any war are:
1. Who will win the war? and
2. Should we enter any given war at all?
One can look to World War II when the second question was answered because Japan forced The US’s hand. The first question remained an unknown at least until America developed the atom bomb.
Since then, the lessons of Vietnam and Afghanistan resound. Perhaps of Korea too. Who will win the current war? That depends on how we define victory. Or perhaps on how Iran intends to survive and have its theocracy re-emerge in some mutated form. That is an unknown unknown.
In this case, much is made of whether Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States. Whether that qualifies as a known known, or a known unknown, seems to me beside the point. The correct question to ask is whether, whether pre-emptive or responsive, imminent action was necessary.
For Israel, the answer is a definite yes. One could argue conclusively that this is so for the US as well. After all, if a nation continues to threaten your existence and is developing nuclear weapons capability, prudence dictates that serious threats be handled with serious dispatch.
One day earlier, the US had received intelligence suggesting that Iran has started laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz. Indeed, the US announced that it had destroyed sixteen Iranian mine-laying boats. Later, that number was increased to 28 mine-laying vessels. We might classify this as a known unknown, i.e., we knew, or should have known, that mine laying by Iran was a possibility, even likely, but we don’t know whether mines had been laid, or where they are or how many have been laid.
Of interest is that the US Navy decommissioned half of its Avenger-class anti-mine ships a year ago. They are being replaced with littoral combat ships that have anti-mine capabilities. The Navy Times reports that a 2017 Office of Naval Intelligence report recognized that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps espouses mine laying as a major tenet of its naval military doctrine. The Navy Times also reported that the US remains confident that its new phase of mine countermeasure capabilities can successfully thwart mine warfare.
Existential threat
On the other hand, what are we to make of President Trump’s call on America’s allies—and even China—to help ensure that the Strait of Hormuz remains navigable for ships carrying oil, natural gas, helium, sulfur, and refined petroleum distillates? Navigation, of course, is a two-way affair. The Gulf nations import most of their food; for them, an open Strait of Hormuz is existential.
On that same Wednesday, ABC News published what may prove to be a false report that the FBI had issued an alert warning that Iran could launch drones at the US West Coast. When asked whether he was concerned about possible retaliatory attacks by Iran on US soil, President Trump replied, “No, I’m not.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called on ABC to retract its story “for providing false information to intentionally alarm the American people.”
These developments tell us that the US and Israel may or may not have the same objectives in this war, that Iran’s remaining offensive capabilities allow it to engage in asymmetric warfare threatening its Gulf neighbours and potentially portending a global recession, even a depression.
Certainly, Iran’s ongoing asymmetric tactics also tell us that a greatly damaged, weakened and degraded theocracy still has the ability to choke the world’s oil supply lines. How long this can and will continue is another unknown unknown.
The Israeli position, as articulated by Katz is not different from the formulation we heard about that country’s objectives in Gaza. Whereas one might have expected the goals of the US and Israel to have overlapped, it is no surprise that they are not congruent.
On the one hand, Israel has long viewed Iran as an existential threat and will not squander a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to neuter its conventional and nuclear offenses. On the other hand, the US has seen Iran as just another chess piece to be dealt with by deft manoeuvring and better play. We saw this from Presidents Bush and Obama and now we are seeing it from President Trump who once boasted that the US had obliterated Iran’s nuclear capability. President Trump’s declaration that there is nothing left to bomb, is evocative of George W. Bush’s premature claim of “Mission Accomplished” after he invaded Iraq. On the other hand, Trump’s attempt to declare victory and pack up seems inconsistent with Israel’s desire to persist.
Nor is President Trump’s position consistent with his own declaration, four days earlier, demanding Iran’s unconditional surrender and asserting that he should have a role in selecting the country’s next Supreme Leader.
Iran may have a say in when the US can leave the ring and call it a day. Gulf states are under attack by Iran. These attacks are not limited to US bases on Arabian soil. They are also directed at airports, airlines, ports, hotels, and oil-related infrastructure. “I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react, but we knew it was a possibility,” US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a Pentagon news conference. “I think it was a demonstration of the desperation of the regime.” Whether Mr Hegseth thought the unthinkable was not thinkable given that the Ayatollahs would view the decapitation of their Supreme Leader and other high-ranking officials as existential, is not clear. A regime threatened with destruction should have been expected to act with desperation. In the Rumsfeld matrix, this would be an unknown known in the sense that tacit knowledge was forgotten or ignored.
Where do we go from here?
Prediction is fraught. Much of what happens next depends on what Netanyahu and Trump do. In the case of the former, we can expect that he will press on, pummelling Iran. The Washington Post reports that “senior Israeli officials have told US diplomats that Iranian protesters will ‘get slaughtered’ if they take to the streets against their government even as Israel publicly calls for a popular uprising, according to a State Department cable… circulated by the US Embassy in Jerusalem.” The Post also reports that the cable “relayed an Israeli assessment that Iran’s regime is ‘not cracking’ and is willing to ‘fight to the end’ despite the… killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the ongoing US and Israeli bombing campaign.”
The ultimate unknown unknown is, of course, what President Trump will do. He may “take” Cuba or acquire Greenland by force if necessary. But what will he do about Iran?
Cheerz…
Bwana
Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 20 March 2026
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