The Ben Shapiro Show - July 08, 2026


Trump Just Did The Right Thing On Iran


Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

196.03

Word count

5,394

Sentence count

407

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

44

sentences flagged

Hate speech

94

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The deal between Iran and the United States is over. Iran fired on ships in the Strait of Hormuz yesterday, and the U.S. responded by striking 80 sites in Iran. And then President Trump declared that the deal is effectively dead. Ben Shapiro explains why that deal was destined to fail from the beginning.

Transcript

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Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Well, so much for that Iran-US memorandum of understanding.
00:00:03.000 So yesterday, Iran fired on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and last night, the United States responded by striking some 80 sites in Iran.
00:00:10.000 And then this morning, President Trump declared that the memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States is effectively dead.
00:00:17.000 I, for one, am totally shocked.
00:00:20.000 Well, I mean, I'm not, since I said literally the first day that the MOU was a mistake and that it would fail.
00:00:26.000 That's not because I'm smart.
00:00:28.000 That's because there's this thing.
00:00:29.000 It's called reality.
00:00:31.000 And it doesn't stop existing just because we wish It didn't.
00:00:36.000 Islam exists. 1.00
00:00:37.000 We, the West, are not like them, the Iranian mullahs, and this has consequences. 0.90
00:00:41.000 In just a second, I'm going to explain why that MOU was destined to fail from the beginning, what the West gets wrong about Islam, and what comes next. 0.78
00:00:48.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:57.000 Well, in the least surprising news since Rosie O'Donnell came out as a lesbian, the United States resumed what it called powerful strikes on Iran last night after the Iranians began harassing ships in the Strait of Hormuz again.
00:01:10.000 According to CNBC, the United States began a series of powerful strikes against Iran on Tuesday in retaliation for Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, according to CENTCOM.
00:01:20.000 Tensions have been rising since Iran attacked vessels moving through the Strait earlier this week, with the United States also revoking a sanctions waiver on Iranian oil earlier this week.
00:01:28.000 On Tuesday, CENTCOM put out a statement via X explaining the strikes that they had committed.
00:01:40.000 Well, again, there was no actual real ceasefire that was going on given the fact.
00:02:00.000 That Iran has been routinely harassing ships in the Strait, and the United States has also fired back against Iran for doing precisely that.
00:02:09.000 While Iran has also been warning ships in the Strait of Hormuz, who played you the audio on the show for several weeks at this point, here is some more of the audio that Fox News played yesterday.
00:02:19.000 This is the last warning.
00:02:30.000 You are running danger.
00:02:34.000 Don't put your life in danger.
00:02:37.000 You are ordered to alter course.
00:02:45.000 So, they're not being shy, and they haven't been shy.
00:02:48.000 They are in control of the Strait of Hormuz, and they are going to continue to maintain they are in control of the Strait of Hormuz. 0.67
00:02:54.000 Well, because of all of that, the United States restored sanctions on Iran.
00:02:57.000 According to the New York Times, the Trump administration on Tuesday revoked a waiver allowing the sale of Iranian oil after three tankers were attacked in the Strait.
00:03:05.000 Last month, the Treasury Department had issued a general license allowing Iran to produce, sell, and deliver oil for two months.
00:03:11.000 That exemption represented a major shift in America's approach toward Iran, which has been heavily sanctioned for decades. 0.55
00:03:15.000 And we talked about it at the time, pointing out that if that had been made permanent, then Iran could have been able to reshape its economy.
00:03:21.000 Now, the reality is that a temporary waiver on sanctions did not actually allow for markets to adjust.
00:03:27.000 People were still not buying Iranian oil because they thought the sanctions would go back on and they did not want to be tied into contracts with Iran that would then make them subject to snapback sanctions.
00:03:36.000 For example, the license that was issued, according to the New York Times, by the Treasury Department in June was designed to give Iran greater access to American currency, and it allowed American importers to buy Iranian crude oil.
00:03:46.000 But it turns out that nobody really wanted to do that.
00:03:49.000 Well, President Trump then came out and he said essentially the deal is over.
00:03:55.000 Here he was this morning at the NATO conference in Ankara, Turkey, saying, We attacked very powerfully last night.
00:04:04.000 We attacked very powerfully last night. 1.00
00:04:08.000 The very dangerous people from Iran. 1.00
00:04:14.000 They're sick. 1.00
00:04:15.000 There's something wrong with them. 0.99
00:04:17.000 We said, go and do your funeral stuff.
00:04:20.000 And instead of that, they start shooting rockets at ships yesterday.
00:04:26.000 And so we hit them very hard last night, very hard.
00:04:28.000 I would say 20 to 1, 20 times tougher.
00:04:32.000 And I told them, every time you hit, we hit.
00:04:36.000 And of course, they're dirty players, so they go after everyone, probably including me.
00:04:41.000 I've been number one on their list for years. 1.00
00:04:44.000 And they're a bunch of scum. 1.00
00:04:45.000 You want to know that they're scum. 1.00
00:04:49.000 The president seems to have had enough of all of this. 1.00
00:04:51.000 The president then said about the memorandum of understanding.
00:04:54.000 As far as he is concerned, it is over.
00:04:58.000 Mr. President, is the ceasefire over?
00:05:01.000 Is the ceasefire done?
00:05:02.000 Is the MOU dead?
00:05:05.000 It's a very interesting question.
00:05:07.000 To me, I think it's over.
00:05:11.000 I don't want to deal with them anymore. 1.00
00:05:12.000 They're scum. 1.00
00:05:12.000 You know what scum is? 1.00
00:05:14.000 They're sick people. 1.00
00:05:14.000 They're scum. 1.00
00:05:16.000 They're led by sick people. 1.00
00:05:18.000 And they're vicious, violent people. 1.00
00:05:21.000 And if they had a nuclear weapon, they'd use it. 0.93
00:05:23.000 As far as I'm concerned, it's over.
00:05:25.000 Okay, so again, we have now swiveled from their very reasonable and rational people to their very sick people.
00:05:34.000 He is right now, and he was right before, and he was wrong in the middle. 0.95
00:05:38.000 Here's President Trump saying that the Iranians want to assassinate him, and we have to rid the world of their cancer. 1.00
00:05:43.000 Again, this is correct. 1.00
00:05:46.000 We took out their first set of leaders, we took out their second set of leaders.
00:05:50.000 They want to take out the U.S. leader, me.
00:05:54.000 I'm on every list.
00:05:55.000 I saw things this morning, I'm on every single one of their lists.
00:05:59.000 And so far, I guess I've been a little bit lucky, but that maybe doesn't last very long because that's the way it goes. 0.95
00:06:07.000 But we have great people, but these are evil, sick people, and we have to rid their cancer. 0.99
00:06:12.000 Their cancer. 0.98
00:06:13.000 And you know what you do?
00:06:14.000 You got to cut out cancer early.
00:06:17.000 And that's the way I feel.
00:06:18.000 Folks, in a second, we're going to get to how we got ourselves into this sticky situation.
00:06:23.000 First, when we started Daily Wire, it was very, very small.
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00:07:24.000 Okay.
00:07:25.000 So let's take a step back for just a second.
00:07:28.000 How do we arrive at this particular impasse?
00:07:30.000 Well, we in the West keep making a pretty large scale mistake. 0.99
00:07:35.000 We assume that Islamic actors in the Middle East are just like us. 0.99
00:07:38.000 They want the same things for their kids. 0.98
00:07:40.000 They want the same ends.
00:07:41.000 Human flourishing, right?
00:07:42.000 That's what we want.
00:07:43.000 That's what they want.
00:07:44.000 We all just have different roads to get there.
00:07:47.000 Wrong.
00:07:48.000 If you're going to sit down and negotiate with somebody, you need to understand them.
00:07:51.000 You need to understand their worldview.
00:07:53.000 And you have to be very, very clear-eyed about the differences between their worldview and our worldview.
00:07:59.000 And if you don't, you are likely to walk away with a bad agreement that isn't really an agreement at all that ends in missiles and tears.
00:08:04.000 So let us begin with the Western worldview.
00:08:07.000 What is our worldview?
00:08:08.000 The way that we operate in the world.
00:08:14.000 We are committed to a different set of values than cultures all around the world.
00:08:24.000 We're weird.
00:08:26.000 That is not the norm.
00:08:26.000 It's not what everybody thinks.
00:08:27.000 It is what we think. 0.64
00:08:29.000 Those values are naturalistic outgrowths of our Judeo Christian heritage.
00:08:33.000 They did not come from nowhere. 0.93
00:08:34.000 They came from originally the Old Testament and then the New Testament and then church, and they make us different from other cultures.
00:08:41.000 So, what are some of those values that make the West different?
00:08:44.000 Well, some of those values are things like analytic thinking.
00:08:47.000 And by the way, this is not rooted in some sort of theorizing.
00:08:49.000 This is rooted in actual testable hypotheses about how people in the West think about problems, for example, and how people in, say, the Islamic world think about problems.
00:08:57.000 So, we in the West, we like analytic thinking.
00:08:59.000 We like to break problems down and then strip them of context in order to solve them.
00:09:05.000 Other cultures see problems holistically, they look at relationships between problems as sort of the key to life.
00:09:10.000 So, for example, we may see the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as an isolated problem with an isolated solution. 0.91
00:09:17.000 We pay a little bit of a bribe money, and the Iranians let it go, and everybody goes home happy.
00:09:21.000 The Iranians don't see it that way.
00:09:23.000 They see the Strait of Hormuz as a problem that is part of a larger, interwoven series of problems. 0.53
00:09:28.000 They see it as part of their global conquest strategy, connected with everything from shooting protesters in the streets of Tehran to the maintenance of the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon to the increased power of the Houthis in Yemen and dominance over the Babamandab Strait. 0.73
00:09:47.000 All those things are intertwined, according to the Iranians. 0.88
00:09:50.000 How about individualism?
00:09:52.000 Well, we in the West are highly individualistic.
00:09:54.000 We think of ourselves as individuals with individual motivations.
00:09:58.000 We have a hierarchy of needs and wants.
00:10:00.000 And so we are focused on individual flourishing.
00:10:04.000 Other cultures see themselves and their personal identities as interwoven into networks, religious networks, and kinship networks.
00:10:10.000 So we say things like, hey, you guys, you should want to preserve the life and the lives of yourselves and your citizens.
00:10:17.000 We want Islam to win. 1.00
00:10:19.000 Totally different worldview. 0.99
00:10:21.000 We here in the West, we have something called impersonal pro sociality.
00:10:24.000 So we have high levels of trust in the people who surround us.
00:10:28.000 It's why we don't require as much government interventionism.
00:10:31.000 It's why if you drop your wallet on a normal American street, there's a fairly good shot that somebody will return the wallet to you.
00:10:37.000 That's because we don't predominantly operate in kinship networks, right?
00:10:40.000 Like your cousins and your friends.
00:10:42.000 We operate as a larger society with larger societal obligations.
00:10:47.000 That also means we tend to think of rules.
00:10:49.000 As ways of governing the entire society, not merely as ways of screwing over other people.
00:10:54.000 We are offended by dishonesty.
00:10:56.000 In a lot of other cultures, that's not the case.
00:10:58.000 It's your kin first, it's your tribe first.
00:10:59.000 I mean, literally, your tribe.
00:11:01.000 And that means that agreements with people like that are not worth the paper they're printed on because they are just methods of them getting something over on you.
00:11:08.000 We here in the West, we focus on internal intentions a lot.
00:11:11.000 There are lots of studies to back this.
00:11:13.000 In the West, our murder laws, for example, are rooted in did you intend to do it?
00:11:17.000 Did you plan to do it?
00:11:19.000 Or did you do it by accident?
00:11:21.000 Now, that's unusual.
00:11:22.000 There are a lot of other cultures where that isn't the case, where the cause of accidental death means very little when it comes to the actual punishment.
00:11:30.000 Other cultures have sort of a strict liability system of morality.
00:11:33.000 If you did something I don't like, I don't have to analyze your intentions.
00:11:35.000 I don't have to try to get in your head. 1.00
00:11:37.000 You're bad and you ought to be destroyed. 0.99
00:11:39.000 So, this means that when we project our frame of mind onto other people, when we try to impute intentions to people who don't share our intentions, we make a category error. 0.99
00:11:48.000 And finally, self enhancement.
00:11:49.000 We tend to think of ourselves in the West as competent.
00:11:52.000 As in control, more in control than sometimes we are.
00:11:54.000 Other cultures tend to think of people as out of control, as weak, as only strong in the collective.
00:12:00.000 So, what does all of that mean in terms of our rules for negotiation?
00:12:03.000 Well, in the West, it means that we tend to focus on incentives and strategies that appeal to people like us.
00:12:09.000 We try to look for win win solutions where everybody is better off than they were before.
00:12:14.000 And we try to set up incentives like economic prosperity or individual flourishing or safety or health.
00:12:20.000 And we engage in strategies like logical problem solving.
00:12:23.000 Like, we'll meet you in the middle, conciliation.
00:12:25.000 That's the stuff that the West prizes.
00:12:27.000 But here's the thing we're weird. 0.99
00:12:30.000 We're not like other cultures at all, which is why every single major agreement with an Islamic opponent has ended in tears unless you have completely defeated and destroyed the possibility of that Islamic opponent actually coming back and winning. 0.98
00:12:42.000 Those are the only agreements that are durable at all in the history of agreements with Islamic states. 0.98
00:12:48.000 We are certainly not like the Muslim theocracy in Iran. 0.97
00:12:52.000 President Trump calls them crazy. 0.89
00:12:54.000 And from our perspective, they are because they don't share our way of thinking. 1.00
00:12:56.000 But from their perspective, we're both crazy and also stupid and also weak because we don't think like they do, but we assume that they do. 0.97
00:13:04.000 And so they look at us and we're saying things like, why can't we just focus on human flourishing? 1.00
00:13:07.000 Like, you freaking pansies. 1.00
00:13:10.000 We'll just cut your head off. 1.00
00:13:11.000 So, what exactly do they believe? 0.96
00:13:13.000 Well, the Islamic Republic of Iran believes that in the absence of the infallible 12th Imam who will arrive at the eschaton to make the world Muslim, a qualified Islamic jurist possesses the absolute divine authority to rule both the state and society to ensure fidelity to Sharia law.
00:13:30.000 But that is their actual worldview. 0.89
00:13:32.000 That is why it is an Islamic regime. 0.94
00:13:35.000 It can't be a democratic regime because that runs directly in the teeth of the idea that there is a divine authority absolutely invested in an Islamic jurist to rule society. 0.93
00:13:45.000 This is why all of the talk about a moderate wing inside the Iranian government versus the radical wing inside the Iranian government is a bunch of nonsense. 0.94
00:13:51.000 In the end, the Ayatollahs run the place.
00:13:54.000 And the IRGC, which in some cases is more extreme than the Ayatollahs. 0.85
00:13:58.000 The Iranian regime believes that it is their duty to prepare the entire world for the arrival of the 12th Imam. 0.80
00:14:04.000 Their worldview centers on replacing the current Western led international order with a global system dominated by Islamic values. 0.92
00:14:10.000 And this is where they get coalitional with Russia and China.
00:14:13.000 Because again, they agree on the first step, replacing the current Western led international order, and they disagree on the second step.
00:14:18.000 What replaces it?
00:14:20.000 Russia wants a Russian world order. 0.67
00:14:22.000 China wants a Chinese world order. 0.97
00:14:23.000 And Muslim states like Iran want an Islamic world order. 0.96
00:14:27.000 They believe that Islam must become the dominant geopolitical and spiritual force on planet Earth and that secular, capitalist, Western systems are corrupt and destined to fail. 0.95
00:14:36.000 So, what does all that mean in terms of Islamic rules for negotiation if you're negotiating a deal?
00:14:40.000 Well, it means that lying, takiyah is the Islamic term for it, is totally fine in wartime. 0.91
00:14:46.000 It is encouraged if it gets you to where you need to go. 0.96
00:14:48.000 In fact, Muhammad performed takiyah. 0.72
00:14:50.000 In the middle of the Quran, and it is praised. 0.96
00:14:53.000 It means that power and perception of power are literally the only coin of the realm. 0.94
00:14:58.000 If you are perceived as weak, some other tribe will come and rape your wife and sell your kids into slavery, historically speaking.
00:15:04.000 Okay, so how do you make a deal with people who think like this, whose set of incentives is different, whose logical thinking is different, whose approach to negotiation is totally different?
00:15:13.000 The only way to make a successful deal with people who think like this is to totally and completely devastate their capacity to win.
00:15:21.000 You have to crush their hope for victory.
00:15:23.000 Hope is the.
00:15:24.000 Hope is the thing that destroys these agreements.
00:15:26.000 You want to know why there has long been a feasible agreement between Israel and Egypt?
00:15:31.000 It's not because Egypt is wonderful and moderate.
00:15:33.000 You may have been watching the World Cup over the course of the last few days. 0.95
00:15:36.000 Let's just say the behavior of the Egyptian team gives the lie to the idea that Egypt is filled with Muslim moderates.
00:15:43.000 But why is there a durable agreement between Israel and Egypt? 0.82
00:15:47.000 Because Egypt knows that if they go up against Israel, Israel will destroy them.
00:15:50.000 And they know that because they tried it in 67 and Israel destroyed them, and then Israel destroyed them again in 73.
00:15:55.000 And why is it that Oslo failed? 0.76
00:15:57.000 Well, because not only was Israel not destroying its opposition, Israel was offering them hope and an olive branch that they could destroy Israel. 0.71
00:16:05.000 The only way to have a successful agreement in the Middle East is for one side to be so thoroughly devastated that the only way out is to basically give up the ghost and try to play it as a win. 0.72
00:16:15.000 And by the way, even if you do, you might get shot by your own people because that's what happened to Anwar al Sadat in Egypt when he did this with Menachem Begin in Israel. 0.53
00:16:23.000 And this is why the MOU was bound to fail because we didn't do that.
00:16:27.000 Now, President Trump looked at Iran on an absolute level and he kept saying, they're dead, right?
00:16:32.000 Dead economy, military basically defenestrated, ballistic missile facilities gone, missile launchers tremendously damaged, nuclear facilities blown up, a navy at the bottom of the sea, a leadership class entirely dead.
00:16:46.000 And he said, okay, well, I guess they're defeated.
00:16:47.000 Now it's time for them to negotiate their surrender.
00:16:49.000 Here's what they saw an America that wanted to negotiate, an America that was afraid to finish them off, an America that was not going to forcibly open the strait and, in fact, was begging for the strait to be opened, begging them for the strait to be opened.
00:17:03.000 Okay, so that's why the MOU was going to fail because total misalignment.
00:17:08.000 And that requires us to answer another question. 0.77
00:17:09.000 So, why is Iran doing this now? 0.73
00:17:11.000 Why didn't Iran just wait this thing out? 0.78
00:17:13.000 Why didn't they take their oil money and their sanctions relief and basically string us along and then go ahead and violate the agreement? 0.80
00:17:19.000 Why go so hard?
00:17:20.000 Why harass shipping in the Strait of Hormuz?
00:17:23.000 Well, the answer is something fundamental.
00:17:26.000 Iran cannot appear weak.
00:17:29.000 That is the entire game. 0.65
00:17:31.000 And because Iran cannot appear weak, the minute they appear weak, this is the entire game in the Middle East.
00:17:36.000 Once they appear weak, their regime is in danger. 0.90
00:17:38.000 It's the reason they were seeking a nuclear weapon in the first place.
00:17:41.000 They never interpreted the nonsensical and empty memorandum of understanding negotiated by the vice president the way that we did.
00:17:48.000 They did not.
00:17:49.000 Here's what actually happened.
00:17:51.000 In a second, we'll get to what actually happened in these benighted negotiations.
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00:19:03.000 Vice President JD Vance and the administration came home waving that MOU with Iran and shouting peace in our time.
00:19:09.000 But as I said at the time, it wasn't a deal, not just because.
00:19:12.000 It wasn't a final deal, but because it wasn't a deal at all.
00:19:16.000 A deal requires an agreement on the terms.
00:19:20.000 A deal requires an agreement on the terms.
00:19:22.000 Again, this is fundamental to contract law.
00:19:24.000 If you and I have an agreement that means nothing, like there are no words in the agreement, it is not an agreement.
00:19:31.000 You have to have defined terms where both sides have a meeting of the minds.
00:19:34.000 There was no clarity on the single most important issue what happens to the strait?
00:19:38.000 The United States said it's open. 0.99
00:19:39.000 The Iranians said nope, we control it. 1.00
00:19:41.000 Or the second most important issue, Lebanon.
00:19:43.000 The United States said, totally disconnected.
00:19:46.000 And the Iranians said, no, no, no.
00:19:47.000 Israel has to stop attacking our terrorist proxy, Hezbollah.
00:19:50.000 Or the third most important issue, nuclear weapons.
00:19:52.000 The United States said, oh, that'll be disarmed.
00:19:54.000 And the Iranians said, we're not even letting inspectors in.
00:19:56.000 Or the fourth most important issue, ballistic missile and drone development. 0.86
00:19:59.000 We said, they're going to have to stop some of that.
00:20:01.000 And they said, that's not in the agreement at all.
00:20:03.000 It was not written from a position of strength.
00:20:05.000 The administration misinterpreted what it was that was supposedly in the agreement.
00:20:10.000 The vice president, there are two possibilities here.
00:20:12.000 One was that he was wish casting.
00:20:15.000 That he was trying to will into reality this fiction that Iran would somehow accept publicly that the United States controls the Strait of Hormuz.
00:20:22.000 That's the thing he was selling publicly.
00:20:23.000 And that's what President Trump was selling, presumably because JD Vance and Steve Witkopf and Jared Kushner told him that that was the case.
00:20:30.000 But that was never the case. 0.58
00:20:32.000 Iran was always in control of the Strait. 0.99
00:20:35.000 Duh. 0.76
00:20:36.000 We actually tried to do an operation that we then allowed the Saudis to shut down.
00:20:40.000 By the way, I will never understand this. 0.66
00:20:41.000 I'll never understand this.
00:20:42.000 Supposedly, according to people on the left and the woke right, Israel is the bad ally.
00:20:47.000 Israel is flying literal sorties alongside the United States and essentially acquiescing to the demands of the United States on every level.
00:20:54.000 Meanwhile, the Saudis, who do nothing, literally nothing, the Saudi royal government has American bases there defending them.
00:21:02.000 And they said to the United States, you can't use our bases to open the strait. 0.97
00:21:05.000 That would mostly benefit the Saudis. 1.00
00:21:08.000 And somehow we acquiesced to that. 0.85
00:21:09.000 Why?
00:21:09.000 We should have just told them there are bases and we'll do with them what we please.
00:21:13.000 In any case, there was never any agreement by Iran to open the strait.
00:21:18.000 So again, either JD Vance is really, really naive and he thought that the Iranians were good, solid people, and the Pakistanis, he loves the Pakistanis, he loves Pakistan.
00:21:26.000 Doesn't matter that Pakistan and Iran are hand in glove, doesn't matter that the prime minister of Pakistan literally went to Iran over the weekend and pledged fealty to the Iranian government.
00:21:37.000 It doesn't matter for these negotiators that Qatar is an Iranian cutout.
00:21:40.000 They're just naive. 0.95
00:21:41.000 I mean, that's a possibility.
00:21:42.000 They're naive.
00:21:42.000 They got played.
00:21:44.000 Or, all these negotiators basically knew that the Iranians were never going to agree that the Strait of Hormuz was open. 0.74
00:21:51.000 And they were fibbing to the president to try to get President Trump to buy into letting the Iranians off the hook, hoping that the Iranians would basically tap this out over time. 0.69
00:21:59.000 Trump would get bored. 0.94
00:21:59.000 He'd go home. 0.94
00:22:00.000 And everything would go back to normal, except that the Iranians would control the Strait. 1.00
00:22:04.000 Okay, but here's the thing Iran could never in a million years. 0.52
00:22:08.000 Have lived with the public perception that they don't control the Strait. 0.95
00:22:13.000 That chokehold is the whole game for them. 0.96
00:22:15.000 Assume for a second, for a second, that Iran didn't control the Strait. 0.99
00:22:20.000 Everyone would know that the war was over and they had lost. 1.00
00:22:24.000 This is just a reality.
00:22:26.000 That is their big weapon.
00:22:27.000 Everyone knows that's their big weapon.
00:22:30.000 Lose the Strait and it's over and they know it.
00:22:32.000 So they were never going to sign a piece of paper admitting that they didn't control the Strait, the only thing that keeps them relevant.
00:22:39.000 We spent months hammering the regime, Air Force, Navy, missile sites, nuclear program. 0.93
00:22:43.000 That was the exact moment to press, not to sign an MOU, because the moment you see weakness from Iran is the moment you ought to show aggression, because that's the way they think. 0.98
00:22:52.000 You have to think like they think. 0.98
00:22:54.000 You want to get a good agreement?
00:22:55.000 Put yourself in the side of the other, put yourself in the shoes of the other side, and then think like they do. 0.98
00:23:01.000 Instead, we showed up as dumb Westerners and shook their hand and looked for mutually beneficial arrangements. 0.90
00:23:07.000 Listen, if Iran wanted to engage in mutually beneficial arrangements with the West, they could have done so any time over the course of the last. 0.97
00:23:15.000 47 years. 0.84
00:23:16.000 If Iran wanted a humming economy, they could have just not been Islamists. 0.93
00:23:21.000 They could have not done that. 0.55
00:23:24.000 They could have even been an Islamic state. 0.70
00:23:26.000 Saudi is an Islamic state.
00:23:28.000 UAE is an Islamic state.
00:23:30.000 Bahrain and Qatar, Islamic states. 0.83
00:23:32.000 All they had to do was just open up and not fund gigantic terror apparatuses around the Middle East and not try to overthrow surrounding regimes. 0.74
00:23:45.000 They could have normalized anytime they wanted to.
00:23:47.000 They didn't do any of that.
00:23:48.000 Because that's not their logic.
00:23:48.000 Why?
00:23:50.000 They didn't want the handshake.
00:23:52.000 We extended a handshake and they slapped us in the face, which is absolutely predictable.
00:23:56.000 So, here are three things that we need to take away from all of this.
00:24:00.000 First, they do not think like us, they don't think like us.
00:24:06.000 They have a different worldview, they have a different theology. 1.00
00:24:08.000 And projecting our thinking onto them is not just wrong, it is catastrophically stupid because they do not think the way we do. 0.99
00:24:19.000 Two, there is no such thing as a good agreement with an evil enemy unless you absolutely force them to the floor. 0.99
00:24:25.000 And third, it is now time to force them to the floor.
00:24:27.000 If this is just another of the myriad twists and turns in the journey of life, if it turns out that this is just a prelude to another set of dumb negotiations where we completely misinterpret what they want, and this is just a prelude to, oh no, the MOU is still on, it was just tit for tat, then this will not end and it will not get better.
00:24:46.000 And believe you me, right around the time of the election, the Iranians will shut the straight to screw Trump right before the midterms because they know that the Democrats will be far friendlier. 0.51
00:24:55.000 So, what exactly could be done? 0.88
00:24:56.000 Well, first, we could force open the strait.
00:24:58.000 I know we haven't even tried it.
00:24:59.000 We didn't try it.
00:24:59.000 We could do it.
00:25:01.000 We could.
00:25:03.000 If you think that the U.S. military does not have contingency plans for opening the Strait of Hormuz along with our allies, you're out of your mind.
00:25:08.000 We do. 1.00
00:25:09.000 We just decided we didn't want to because we got chicken with Saudi. 0.99
00:25:14.000 And we were told by our magical negotiators that a deal was in the offing, which was a lie. 0.98
00:25:18.000 It wasn't true.
00:25:20.000 We could open the strait. 1.00
00:25:22.000 We could destroy Kharga Island, which is their oil export facility. 0.98
00:25:25.000 We could destroy the South Pars gas field. 0.83
00:25:27.000 We could basically put their economy.
00:25:29.000 On unsupportable legs. 0.89
00:25:32.000 We could put the regime into its death row. 0.94
00:25:34.000 Those are all things that we could do.
00:25:37.000 Or we could just walk away and let our allies do any or all of those things.
00:25:40.000 We could do any of those things.
00:25:41.000 But here's the thing we should not do demonstrate weakness by going back to the table and pretending, once again, that they are reasonable, rational people. 0.63
00:25:48.000 The greatest prize you can hand to Islamic terrorist regimes is the perception that they are rational actors in the way that we mean rational actors. 0.89
00:25:59.000 That is the whole game. 0.99
00:26:00.000 They use that perception, they twist it on you, and then they use that perception to destroy you. 0.99
00:26:05.000 If that's a lesson that we haven't learned over the course of the last several decades, then again, we are too stupid for words. 0.95
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