The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - April 21, 2026


PREVIEW LIVE： Realpolitik #43 ｜ The System Has to Break

Topics
Iranian blockade and U.S. counter-blockade
Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Khamenei Trump Firas Maudad Nice Guy Bismarck Rothman Galibaf Hormuz Araqji Vahidi Putin Edan
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1400 The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1402

Episode Stats


Length

26 minutes

Words per minute

140.51

Word count

3,719

Sentence count

159

Harmful content

Hate speech

37

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, Firas Maudad talks about the situation in the Strait of Hormuz and Iran's counter-blockade, the possibility of the war resuming, and what our techno future looks like on the back of this war.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Maudad.
00:00:07.800 Today, I think we have quite a bit to talk about from the talks that are supposed to happen.
00:00:17.700 Maybe they'll happen. Maybe they won't happen. The possibility of the war resuming.
00:00:22.020 And a little bit about what our techno future looks like on the back of this war.
00:00:30.000 because that's quite interesting and it's coming in the context of energy starvation that is being
00:00:35.280 imposed by this war. And so we're going to talk through all of that on this show today.
00:00:42.080 Let's start with where we are in terms of the fighting, or not so much the fighting,
00:00:48.400 but with the Iranian blockade and the American counter-blockade that is going on right now.
00:00:54.240 Now, we saw over the weekend a bunch of attacks by the Iranian Navy targeting ships in the
00:01:02.260 Strait of Hormuz intended to maintain Iran's blockade.
00:01:07.100 This came after Trump had first said that the Strait was going to be open, then the
00:01:11.960 Iranians said the same thing.
00:01:13.860 Then Trump said that, yeah, the Strait is going to be open, but the blockade on Iran
00:01:18.660 is going to continue until there is an agreement.
00:01:21.940 And so the Iranians rather predictably responded to that by re-blocking the strait and opening fire at a bunch of the ships that were passing through. 0.55
00:01:35.760 I think it was two Indian ships and a third maybe cargo ship, two Indian tackers and a third cargo ship, I think.
00:01:43.520 Because when the announcement that the strait was opened happened, a lot of the ships that were trapped in the Strait of Hormuz immediately decided to make a run for it and try to cross before it would be closed again.
00:01:59.180 But in reality, it just never happened. There was no opening of the strait. There was nothing of the sort.
00:02:04.100 and then a two days later the United States blows up a hole in the engine room of an Iranian tanker
00:02:15.920 that was trying to run the American blockade the counter blockade on Iran's blockade essentially
00:02:22.020 they managed to disable the ship by attacking the the engines of it and that's an easy thing to do
00:02:30.300 if you're a sophisticated military like the U.S. Navy. And now we are kind of back where we started.
00:02:37.120 And the idea from both sides seems to be to maximize the leverage that they have
00:02:43.220 before any negotiations happen. And this from Amit Segal, an Israeli journalist,
00:02:52.440 he's saying that the current discussions for negotiations are that the enrichment of
00:03:00.280 uranium would be suspended in Iran for 15 years. The Iranians wanted less, the United States wanted
00:03:08.920 20, so 15 was the compromise. But the enriched uranium wouldn't leave Iran. Instead, it would be
00:03:18.760 fully inspected and be under constant United Nations surveillance through the International
00:03:26.200 atomic energy agency, which we know is riddled with Western spies who feed information to the
00:03:33.820 West because that's the purpose of pretty much all UN agencies. And indeed, it's not just the
00:03:39.320 West that has its spies there. If the Chinese have people there, they're probably Chinese spies. If 0.89
00:03:43.720 the Russians have people there, they're probably Russian spies, etc., etc. But then what would also 0.89
00:03:51.660 happen is that some of Iran's funds would be released and sanctions on Iran would be lifted
00:03:58.440 gradually. Now for the Israelis the lifting of sanctions is a bit of a disaster because it
00:04:04.980 brings the regime back to life really and it means that they can spin a narrative of victory
00:04:10.860 and in any kind of narrative of victory it is the hardliners who win because they chose the
00:04:18.420 difficult path and they chose to fight. And that means that they end up with the upper hand. And
00:04:23.700 that means that the Iranians double down on the missile program. And one of the red lines that 0.85
00:04:29.140 has been announced by the Israelis is that they don't want the Iranians to accumulate more than 0.55
00:04:35.920 a few thousand missiles, which they already have probably more than that, because more than a few
00:04:41.880 thousand missiles becomes impossible to intercept and then the iranians can take out israeli
00:04:48.780 infrastructure and if we as we've discussed a bunch of times on the show when you're dealing
00:04:54.720 with a country the size of israel you are dealing with a tiny territory with no strategic depth
00:05:01.380 there is a bunch of industries that are concentrated around here in the south between
00:05:06.340 Dimona and Arad. There is an energy port here in Ashdod and in Ashkelon, and another one in Haifa.
00:05:16.200 And then there is a massive urban area extending all along the coast, the Tel Aviv-Yafa region.
00:05:23.520 And if you target those repeatedly, you just paralyze life in Israel. So the problem that
00:05:28.800 the Israelis are trying to solve is their lack of strategic depth. They want to do that by 0.99
00:05:34.800 expanding, but even if they, you know, do what they've already done, which is take bits of
00:05:40.180 Lebanon and Syria, and maybe try to take bits of Jordan, it doesn't solve the problem that this is
00:05:47.860 a tiny space with very concentrated infrastructure and industry, and that it would be enormously
00:05:55.300 vulnerable to missiles. Which is why what Amit Segal is saying is that the preferred outcome
00:06:02.680 for the Israelis is this kind of no war no peace which is what had happened in Iraq between 1990
00:06:12.220 and 2003. If you will remember the Iraq war the first one Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and this
00:06:21.540 meant that its oil resources were essentially more or less doubled because Kuwait is so rich in oil
00:06:31.840 and that meant that Iraq could secure the Basra vulnerability that it had
00:06:39.120 because it can only trade through a single port here in Basra and Shatt al-Arab.
00:06:46.020 And with that additional space and these additional resources,
00:06:49.720 Iraq would become a much more powerful country. 0.93
00:06:52.840 And so the United States defeated it in 1990 and kept it in a state of no war, no peace for 13 years. 0.94
00:07:01.840 with massive sanctions on the country that, you know, led to the death of, among others,
00:07:07.520 half a million children, but which meant that the Iraqis were permanently paralyzed
00:07:11.860 and that they couldn't rebuild their military and slowly the Iraqi state was sufficiently weakened
00:07:18.740 so that the 2003 invasion could happen. And so what the Israelis are envisioning as a way
00:07:26.820 out of this war in Iran is to really not reach any deal
00:07:33.260 and to keep this conflict in,
00:07:38.960 I don't want to say suspended animation
00:07:41.260 because it wouldn't be suspended 1.00
00:07:42.580 because the Iranians could still attack energy infrastructure, 0.77
00:07:46.420 they could still attack shipping,
00:07:48.120 they could still affect trade,
00:07:49.660 they could do all of these things
00:07:51.180 and they would still be subject to an American naval blockade. 0.59
00:07:54.920 And so what the Israelis are after are this becoming a permanent state of affairs, where the whole world's economy is held hostage by this conflict, by Iran, which is the party that's conducting attacks against energy, and by the Gulf states, which are the party that are permitting these attacks on Iranian infrastructure and energy by giving the United States military access.
00:08:22.540 And so you end up in, essentially, an energy starvation scenario.
00:08:30.120 Now, before we get into that, what's Trump doing and what's his view on all of this?
00:08:37.360 Well, let's go through the timeline.
00:08:39.680 At some point, Trump announces that, as a matter of fact, the Iranians are removing the sea mines from Hormuz,
00:08:48.920 meaning that a deal is close at hand and has been agreed.
00:08:52.540 and then he says that the Iranians have announced the Strait of Iran,
00:08:59.060 not the Strait of Hormuz, is fully open and ready for operation.
00:09:04.460 Okay, that means the conflict is solved, doesn't it?
00:09:08.900 Then he says, but actually the naval blockade against Iran is going to remain in place
00:09:14.600 until there is a full agreement.
00:09:16.260 and that this should be very quick because most of the points are already negotiated.
00:09:23.720 Somewhat confusing. The next day he says that if the ceasefire, if there isn't an agreement by
00:09:31.640 Wednesday, in two days from this broadcast, the bombs will start dropping again. And then he says
00:09:39.600 that the Iranians are attacking ships, which they were, and that wasn't nice. We are still going to
00:09:47.200 negotiate, but actually Iran is helping us by maintaining the blockade, which doesn't make a
00:09:56.580 lot of sense, really. His argument is that the world is buying a lot more energy from the United
00:10:02.920 States, which is true. We're going to discuss that in a little bit. And then he threatens again
00:10:10.300 that he's going to knock out every single power plant at every single bridge in Iran.
00:10:15.240 No more Mr. Nice Guy. They will come down fast. They will come down easy. And if they don't take
00:10:21.440 the deal, it'll be my honor to do what needs to be done. And then to top it all off, to Trump
00:10:32.360 issues a video essentially calling for regime change again. Now this is the familiar pattern
00:10:41.060 of Trump saying that a deal has happened and maybe it has and maybe it hasn't and then putting more
00:10:47.560 pressure on the adversary and trying to get concessions that way in order to reach an
00:10:53.080 agreement. But the issue is that this always comes at a cost because given the fact that the Iranians 1.00
00:11:01.500 have been attacked twice during negotiations already when trump makes these kinds of statements
00:11:08.220 what the iranians conclude is that he's setting a trap again and that trump doesn't actually want
00:11:16.880 to negotiate he wants to return to the war and if you're iran and this is your perspective
00:11:23.460 well it's kind of understandable why you'd have this perspective because you were attacked twice
00:11:28.340 during negotiations. And so maybe the other objective is, really, as Mr. Rothman here
00:11:37.840 says, that there are divisions within Iran between the different parties and the idea
00:11:45.760 is to, and, you know, this is a sign that the regime is fractured and desperate.
00:11:53.260 And I want to talk a little bit about the divisions within Iran, right? Because obviously
00:11:58.320 there are different power centers within the Iranian establishment, just like there are
00:12:03.600 different power centers within the American establishment or the Israeli establishment
00:12:07.940 or the British establishment. This is kind of normal. But this division within Iran between
00:12:15.580 the people who prefer negotiations, the diplomatic side, so people like the Speaker of Parliament,
00:12:21.160 Galibaf, or the Foreign Secretary Araqji, or any of the others, versus the IRGC, now represented
00:12:30.100 by Vahidi. These have always been the norm in Iran back from the days of the Safavid Empire.
00:12:39.420 So the Safavid Empire was established in the 1600s, 1700s, and really was the prototype of
00:12:47.300 the modern Iranian state, and it spanned a territory extending from Afghanistan to Iraq,
00:12:54.660 essentially, with bits of Central Asia, Iran itself, bits of Armenia and Azerbaijan,
00:13:00.900 that territory. And it was constantly in combat with the Ottomans, and it regularly allied
00:13:08.760 with the West against the Ottomans. And this goes to a point that I keep on making,
00:13:14.780 which is that Iran is a natural ally of the West, were it not for the Israel issue. 0.65
00:13:21.260 Because Iran is surrounded by major Sunni powers, and as a minority Shia state,
00:13:27.300 it needs external support, and it has tended historically to look to the West for that
00:13:33.560 external support, including the Portuguese, the British, and others, and then the Americans,
00:13:44.780 itself and fortify itself against attacks by its neighbors. Now in the days of the Safavids there 0.99
00:13:51.860 was always a division between what were termed the men of the sword and the men of the pen
00:13:57.440 which is essentially today the same division that you have between the diplomats and the IRGC
00:14:05.300 and if you look at Iranian diplomats and senior government officials these are incredibly well
00:14:12.040 educated, impressive men. They're quite capable when it comes to their roles. And if you look at
00:14:20.040 the IRGC guys, these all are graduates of the Iran-Iraq war. They're all veterans of the Iran-Iraq
00:14:28.200 war, where the Iranians did things like send massive human waves to attack Iraqi minefields
00:14:36.820 and machine gun positions and just died in huge numbers so the people who rose to the top within 0.63
00:14:44.900 the irgc were the people who were sufficiently clever and fanatical to survive this to first
00:14:54.260 fight this war and second to survive this war and these people naturally have different outlooks
00:15:01.220 And the way that it worked under Khamenei, the father, not Khamenei, the son, Mujtaba, was that Khamenei would always actually exploit this division.
00:15:14.400 He would use the hardliners to make sure that the diplomats could get the best deal possible.
00:15:22.680 And he would use the diplomats to soften the effect of the actions of the hardliners.
00:15:28.780 So these two wings of the regime are typically in balance when there is strong leadership.
00:15:39.120 And under Mushtaba, if he is alive, which is a big if, he has the authority to provide that
00:15:47.160 strong leadership and play the same game. So yes, you are seeing divisions within Iran.
00:15:56.100 They are obvious, between the hardliners and the diplomats, between the men of the sword,
00:16:01.740 or the men of the missile, or the men of the drone, perhaps most accurately,
00:16:05.520 and the men of the sword, the men of the pen, I mean. But this division is normal for Iran. 0.93
00:16:12.800 And this division is part of how the Iranian regime naturally functions. And it is reflected 0.99
00:16:19.760 everywhere. If you go and look at, say, World War I history, and what was going on in the
00:16:27.180 chancelleries of Europe, well, it was always the same thing. The Austrian defense minister always
00:16:33.420 advocated for war, and the Austrian war minister, obviously, at the time, because we weren't, you
00:16:39.940 know, the West wasn't cucked then. And the Austrian foreign minister always advocated for diplomacy
00:16:46.840 CMPs. And they worked together, and they had their conflicts, and they were vying for the
00:16:53.800 attention of the emperor. So this is normal, but it is really a problem if there isn't an emperor.
00:17:01.800 And in Edan's case, the emperor is the supreme leader. And until we know anything with confidence
00:17:09.880 about the condition of Khamenei, we can't really make very strong judgments on whether or not this
00:17:17.900 is the regime that is fractured and desperate. Because in fact, historically speaking, this is
00:17:24.920 the way that Iran is meant to work. This has always been the way that Iran works, with this 0.99
00:17:33.360 division always present. So I just wanted to mention that by way of caution. What is actually 0.98
00:17:43.180 unusual is to have the situation which the United States is in, where even the Secretary of State
00:17:51.420 is a neocon and is part of a faction that always advocates war. That's unusual. That's the less
00:18:02.200 typical thing, historically speaking. But in fact, the division that you see in Iran,
00:18:08.780 that's actually what normal is like. You see it in Russia. Lavrov always advocating for
00:18:15.780 diplomacy, always trying to find a new agreement, trying to find a new deal. And the guys in defense
00:18:21.980 saying, you know, there's going to be fire and brimstone. And Putin sitting at the top,
00:18:27.960 navigating the two factions, you see it in China. So what's abnormal is to have consensus over war.
00:18:40.220 That said, the Iranians have taken a massive beating, and anybody who tells you otherwise
00:18:46.280 isn't telling you the truth. And the concern for the men of the pen in Iran's case is that 0.78
00:18:53.560 they don't know how the economy will recover if the war ends with the economy destroyed and them
00:19:00.120 being placed permanently under sanctions in the way that they are now. Because they can't be
00:19:07.860 assured that the Chinese or the Russians won't bargain the Iran card away in the same way that
00:19:15.740 the Russians bargained away the Syria card. So the concerns of the diplomats in Iran and them
00:19:24.000 wanting some kind of agreement, these are valid concerns. And the problem is that the concerns
00:19:30.940 of the men of the drone, as I will be calling them, the IRGC, are also valid. Because if they
00:19:38.720 don't prove themselves on the battlefield, and if they don't somehow make the cost of the war 0.99
00:19:45.420 so exorbitant that it cannot happen again, then actually they will end up like Iraq 0.64
00:19:52.620 in the 1990s, and they will be getting pounded every few years in the same way that Iraq was
00:20:00.200 pounded every few years. And that's the dilemma that they're facing. That's the problem that they
00:20:06.540 have. They cannot defeat the United States militarily because they cannot hit the American
00:20:12.900 mainland they could cause massive damage to american military bases which they have done
00:20:18.100 and these bases were built up over decades and the equipment that is there takes years to replace
00:20:26.280 especially some of the radar equipment um the awaxes that were hit that's a big deal
00:20:32.060 but this is not enough to actually defeat the united states the most that they can achieve
00:20:39.760 is to deny the Americans a win
00:20:42.520 in the same way that the Taliban 0.50
00:20:45.760 denied the Americans a win.
00:20:48.780 But you can't say, you know,
00:20:51.500 and I know that sometimes my language isn't always precise,
00:20:55.020 you can't say that the Americans defeated the United States.
00:20:59.540 You can say that they defeated the United States in Afghanistan.
00:21:03.820 You can say that the United States was defeated in Vietnam,
00:21:06.460 But the United States didn't end up a defeated country in the same way that the French were after Bismarck's invasion
00:21:14.840 or in the same way that the Germans were after World War II.
00:21:19.580 So there are degrees of defeat. 0.98
00:21:22.860 And the kind of defeat that the Iranians can impose on the United States is a local defeat. 0.99
00:21:28.820 The issue is, does this break the global economy so much that it does break the United States? 0.69
00:21:34.820 which is what the IRGC believes is going to be the case. So that's the thinking here and that's
00:21:42.740 the bet. That if the world economy is broken enough, then the dollar hegemony ends. And if
00:21:50.100 the dollar hegemony ends, then the Iranians would have won indirectly because we would be in a world 0.93
00:21:58.640 where American sanctions cannot be enforced, and that would mean that the Iranians are free to
00:22:07.720 trade with whoever they want, and therefore their ability to recover from this war will be much
00:22:13.360 better than Iraq's ability to recover from the defeat of 1990. That's the division here,
00:22:21.780 And that's the thinking here. And as I say, these are valid divisions. These are both valid 1.00
00:22:29.360 perspectives. But the Iranians are stuck and the Americans are stuck. Because if the United States 0.85
00:22:37.660 goes back to war, the economy blows up, etc., etc. And we'll talk about that. So the position that
00:22:45.140 the Iranians have taken is, because the blockade on Iran is still ongoing, and because the ceasefire
00:22:52.800 in Lebanon isn't properly in effect, and this is something that I should have mentioned, on the 16th
00:22:58.340 of April, Trump says that he forbids Israel from conducting further attacks on Lebanon,
00:23:03.600 which is quite unusual. And you may ask yourself, well, how does he do that? The reality is, because
00:23:11.620 he hasn't been able to declare victory on Iran, he's kind of declaring victory on Israel.
00:23:17.420 But the Israelis just went ahead and pretty much ignored him because the ceasefire that they ended
00:23:23.260 up agreeing to allows them to do whatever they want in Lebanon, meaning that it's not a ceasefire
00:23:28.280 at all, and it's not holding. Already we saw Israeli casualties happen in Lebanon. Hezbollah
00:23:36.140 said that these were because of previously laid minefields, that they hadn't conducted a new
00:23:42.280 attack, I wonder. I wonder whether or not this is true, and whether Hezbollah is just being a bit 0.56
00:23:49.600 coy. And so the Iranians are saying, we're not going to participate in talks, because we don't
00:23:56.000 think that you're serious about negotiations. And the way that they're getting out of this dilemma 0.84
00:24:01.240 is by threatening Trump to continue their own escalation
00:24:04.440 and in response to the possible destruction
00:24:08.060 of Iranian infrastructure and Iranian energy and power
00:24:13.460 and things like that,
00:24:15.180 they would do the same to the Gulf
00:24:16.660 and deepen the global crisis. 0.50
00:24:20.820 And I think here, you know,
00:24:24.180 everybody is particularly stuck,
00:24:28.800 but I think that the Americans want to go back to war. 0.99
00:24:31.240 Because if the war ends now, the Iranians are the regional hegemon. 0.90
00:24:39.000 And they can say to the Gulf states that, look, the presence of the United States is useless. 0.85
00:24:44.140 It got so bad that the presidential advisor to the president of the UAE issued a statement saying that we're considering closing American bases and getting paid a new one if we don't get...
00:24:57.580 the central bank separately said, that they would consider getting paid a new one for their oil
00:25:03.120 shipments if they don't get a fresh dollar injection. But it seems to me that's the UAE
00:25:09.580 making threats that it doesn't mean to try to drag the Americans into the war
00:25:12.980 by showing the Americans the consequences of the war ending now.
00:25:20.620 because if the war does end now then the u.s presence in the middle east is kind of pointless
00:25:27.760 the iranians can shut down energy production and energy exports when they want
00:25:33.460 and they will still build up their missile program they would have lost a lot on the
00:25:40.380 nuclear side stuff that they were willing to give up in the oman talks by the way so not not new
00:25:47.100 stuff. But it would mean that the Iranians are the regional hegemon. And that's not a state of 0.92
00:25:55.780 affairs that the United States is willing to accept right now. So I think that Trump is doing
00:26:01.180 all of this to make sure that there is a return to war, but that he is able to blame the Iranians
00:26:06.940 for it in order to justify it to his base. And I think he's saying things like, I forbid the 0.61
00:26:15.240 Israelis from doing this and that, because he is very well aware of how divided his
00:26:20.960 base is over Israel.
00:26:22.560 If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the Lotus Eaters, head to our website
00:26:26.740 where you can find more.