The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - July 14, 2026


PREVIEW LIVE： Realpolitik #55 ｜ The Global Energy War

Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Hormuz Khurram Shahr Firas Maudad Zaporozhya Dnieper Dnipro Odessa Dukhum Ahmadi Wasit Sumy Kiev
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1460 The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1462

Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

138.56

Word count

3,068

Sentence count

114

Harmful content

Hate speech

47

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of Realpolitik, Firas Maudad talks about the situation in Ukraine and Iran and how they are fighting the exact same war, and how Russia and the United States are stuck in a stalemate in the Middle East.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.560 Hello and welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host Firas Maudad and today
00:00:06.660 I wonder what are we going to be talking about? Has anything changed? Has anything substantial
00:00:11.620 happened in the region or in the world really? Well as you've probably guessed yes the Middle
00:00:18.580 East war is back on but I wanted to put it in a bit of a broader context because the argument
00:00:23.600 that I'm going to try to make to you is that the Iranians and the Russians are fighting the exact
00:00:29.160 same war. And this war is basically now in a phase where it cannot stop until either the Iranians or 0.77
00:00:39.380 the Russians are fully defeated, or the United States is pushed away from the vicinity of Russia
00:00:47.440 and Iran. These are the only two possibilities here, which really point to this war, to these
00:00:54.240 wars being much longer with no clear end in sight. Now let's talk a little bit about the
00:01:02.180 strikes that we have seen the Ukrainians conduct against Russia. What we're seeing the Ukrainians 0.87
00:01:09.240 do is very seriously expand their ability to strike Russia's refining capacity and energy 0.92
00:01:16.080 infrastructure and they are just having at it in terms of attacking Russian refineries. Now the
00:01:23.960 Russians always have some fuel problems over the summer, and they often restrict their diesel
00:01:30.900 exports in particular over the summer and have to import gasoline in order to address the fact
00:01:36.780 that their refineries, although a lot of them are quite substantial, simply don't provide enough for
00:01:42.720 the domestic market. But now, with repeated Ukrainian strikes on Russia, this is becoming
00:01:49.080 a bigger and bigger problem and maybe the russians will solve it in a couple of months maybe they
00:01:54.360 won't but essentially the message that is being sent to the russians is that you've got to push
00:02:01.120 the ukrainians much further away and therefore you have to fight for a lot longer and gain a lot
00:02:06.800 more territory for you to have any satisfactory victory conditions when we spoke last week i
00:02:14.320 They explained how the Russians would have to basically advance much further from the
00:02:22.000 territories that they currently control and run into this wall of cities. 0.82
00:02:27.600 Zaporozhya, Dnipro, Poltava, Pavlograd is there somewhere, Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kiev 0.63
00:02:34.980 in order to properly secure the eastern back of the Dnieper and then work their way towards
00:02:43.520 Odessa for them to fully win the war militarily. And this is a years-long project. What we're
00:02:50.860 seeing with the Ukrainians striking so much further in the depth of Russia in regions like 0.96
00:02:56.780 Moscow, St. Petersburg, sometimes even in Siberia, is that this isn't going to be enough for the 0.89
00:03:02.940 Russians. And what they actually need is some kind of major political arrangement with the United
00:03:09.120 States that simply pushes the United States away from Europe. And that is going to eventually
00:03:15.900 require strikes on European countries, similar to how the Iranians are attacking Gulf countries 0.97
00:03:22.260 to force the United States out and to force the Gulf countries to cry uncle and say, 0.80
00:03:28.060 we can no longer host American bases or be an enemy of Iran. We've got a compromise here. 0.54
00:03:34.600 So this is the dynamic that's emerging. And the other dynamic that's emerging is a sort of total war on Russian shipping. So the Ukrainians have managed to attack maybe 90 Russian vessels, according to the Guardian, in the Sea of Azov.
00:03:53.300 the Sea of Azov is here and it's basically next to Russian oil export terminals that go from this
00:04:02.940 strip of territory through the Kerch Strait and then onto the Black Sea to supply Russian clients
00:04:11.440 with oil and gas. And this is really important for the Russians to supply places like Africa
00:04:17.040 and previously Europe. So the fact that the Ukrainians are hitting this area quite hard 1.00
00:04:24.240 means again that the Russians need to get to Odessa and go further in depth. And it also 0.94
00:04:32.360 means that their shipping will remain vulnerable if countries like Romania and Bulgaria are
00:04:38.020 activated, essentially, if they strike Europe. So the conditions that are being placed on Russia
00:04:44.220 are quite horrible from a Russian perspective, and the question is do they decide to escalate
00:04:51.660 or do they decide not to escalate? Now the Iranians are fighting the same exact war. 0.60
00:04:57.620 The objective of the Iranian war is to push the United States away from the region
00:05:03.800 and turn Iran into the regional hegemon over the Persian Gulf.
00:05:08.540 um as you all know the united states has peppered this region with military bases
00:05:16.100 they've got three or four in kuwait they've got uh a base in bahrain they've got bases in qatar
00:05:22.940 they have bases in the uae in saudi arabia they have access to saudi bases in jordan they use
00:05:30.180 multiple bases in oman etc etc so what's happening for the iranians is sort of something similar
00:05:37.580 So long as the United States remains deployed in this region and treats this region as essentially its own, the Iranians can never be safe.
00:05:48.520 And they're fighting the United States with the objective of pushing the Americans away from this region and forcing them to withdraw, which is not going to be acceptable to the United States.
00:06:01.520 The American global empire insists on endless expansion, and it insists that its remit is global, not limited to American territory, and not even limited to the Western Hemisphere.
00:06:16.620 They're not bound by the Monroe Doctrine.
00:06:19.280 the american empire is intended to be global because they believe this is the only way to
00:06:26.820 maintain their primacy and they believe that it is their primacy that provides peace to the world
00:06:31.720 this is the american empire uh i this is this is the american empire's idealistic conception of
00:06:40.480 itself shall we say and now we're in this position where the war in the middle east has fully
00:06:47.400 reignited, and the Americans and the Iranians are exchanging blows. This latest escalation
00:06:55.160 was mainly focused on the Iranian interpretation of Article 5 of the Islamabad Memorandum of
00:07:04.080 Understanding. On, I believe, 17 June, the Iranians and the Americans, just to remind you, signed
00:07:11.260 an MOU that was supposed to provide a pathway to peace, 60 days of negotiation, followed by
00:07:19.780 some kind of new agreement. And the best case scenario always was that the can would be kicked
00:07:28.000 down the road indefinitely, rather than the war restarting at the instigation of one side or the
00:07:34.000 other. And if you read my website, Modad Geopolitics, I argued that the Iranians have a lot of reasons 0.95
00:07:41.040 to restart the war, including the fact that American interceptors are low. There's just 0.92
00:07:47.600 not enough interceptors for the United States. We are seeing that in Ukraine that seems to have
00:07:52.900 run out of patriots and is getting slammed by Russian ballistic missiles a lot more effectively.
00:08:00.100 And because the world economy is on the brink of a major collapse, as Trump himself said,
00:08:06.920 I believe, a few weeks ago, when he said that in a few weeks, in four weeks, if the war continues,
00:08:18.280 the world would have run out of reserves. And that was said four weeks ago, you know. And to be fair,
00:08:25.100 during those four weeks, there were some exports coming out of the Strait of Hormuz,
00:08:28.680 but it was the continuation of these exports that was the problem. Because the oil was, or at least
00:08:35.760 some of the exports were taking place using the southern corridor of the Strait of Hormuz,
00:08:43.260 which hugs the coasts of the UAE and then Oman, and exits the Strait of Hormuz that way. 0.64
00:08:50.540 Whereas what the Iranians wanted was to assure their control over the strait, and to assure that 0.86
00:08:57.760 the shipping would go through their preferred corridor, which goes kind of between these islands 0.97
00:09:05.000 and then out of the strait. This wasn't happening. And this was a problem for the Iranians because
00:09:12.080 the way that they read this clause was that it was the Islamic Republic of Iran that would manage
00:09:20.480 the strait because the MOU says the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements for
00:09:27.160 the safe passage of commercial vessels. The Americans read it as permission to reopen the
00:09:32.880 strait, the Iranians read it as permission to control the strait. And this vagueness in 0.99
00:09:38.940 diplomatic language is always kind of deliberate because it leaves both sides with options.
00:09:44.800 You maintain a degree of ambiguity, which means that you can sell your interpretation to your
00:09:50.560 own public at home, and if you have to break the agreement, you can rely on that ambiguity
00:09:57.480 to justify your actions. So what was happening for the duration of the short-lived ceasefire
00:10:04.560 following the MOU was that a lot of the shipping was going via Omani territorial waters
00:10:14.040 rather than Iranian territorial waters. And it was going without coordination with the Islamic 0.62
00:10:20.960 Revolution Guard Corps, rather than happening with Iranian permission. And the Iranians want 0.93
00:10:27.820 to set this precedent that if you go through the Strait of Hormuz, you have to get their permission 0.97
00:10:32.880 because that means that they can then turn around and say to the Gulf states,
00:10:38.560 we are the ones who are guaranteeing your shipping and your security,
00:10:42.380 not the United States. You should tell the Americans to leave. 0.99
00:10:45.780 If, by contrast, the shipping is going through the Omani lane and bypassing Iranian waters and permission from the IRGC, that means that the Americans are acting as security guarantors, and we saw the Americans claiming that the ships that were going through were coordinated with them and they were happening under their protection, etc. 0.63
00:11:09.480 So the fight that Russia is having with the United States via Ukraine and the fight that Iran is having directly with the United States has essentially the same theme, which is to force the United States away from the near abroad of a growing imperial power, Russia and Iran,
00:11:34.460 and for that imperial power to feel safe from future American attacks.
00:11:40.860 And it's not that they are not willing to work with the Americans.
00:11:44.700 You see the story here coming out from the New York Times,
00:11:50.780 basically reported by a class report, which is linked to Turkish intelligence.
00:11:55.240 You see these guys saying that actually the Israelis were working with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
00:12:01.220 the former president of Iran, to try to install him as an Iranian leader.
00:12:08.080 Now, Ahmadinejad, if you go back in memory,
00:12:11.500 he fell out with a bunch of the more religious elements with Iran
00:12:15.940 because he was an Iranian nationalist before being an Islamic revolutionary.
00:12:21.700 And this is a constant fight and a real fight within Iran.
00:12:25.760 If you're an Iranian nationalist, you look at the map
00:12:29.240 and you see that the Israelis and the Iranians don't have a border,
00:12:35.060 they can reach an accommodation where the Iranians control Iraq,
00:12:39.820 the Israelis build their greater Israel, 0.98
00:12:43.340 and they together crush the Sunnis in Saudi Arabia, in Turkey, 0.97
00:12:50.060 wherever they happen to be, by collaborating with each other. 0.97
00:12:55.120 This was the policy that was under the Shah. 0.80
00:12:57.240 and it was justified by the threat of Arab nationalism and by the threat of Sunni Islam. 0.80
00:13:05.760 So we can't have that because of the religious sentiment in Iran 0.81
00:13:12.680 and because of Israeli expansionism that is going into Lebanon
00:13:17.620 and attacking the Shia in Lebanon in order to expand Israel's borders.
00:13:22.840 So therefore, peace between the two sides is impossible right now, but Ahmadinejad clearly
00:13:30.220 thought that it was a possibility. Anyway, I digress. Given the fight over control of Hormuz,
00:13:39.300 given this conflict between Iran and the United States over pushing the United States away
00:13:47.660 from its borders, and sorry, just to go into another digression, the same dynamic can be
00:13:54.100 reached with Russia. The Russian ambition is not to take over all of Europe. The Russian ambition
00:13:59.100 is to divide Europe between them and the United States in the same way that it had been divided
00:14:05.680 in the Cold War. It's the same idea. But the Americans and the Israelis insist on too much
00:14:13.440 expansion for these smaller powers, Iran and Russia, that expansion is a direct threat to them.
00:14:20.720 You see the Atlantic Council putting out papers arguing that Russia should be partitioned.
00:14:26.060 You see plans elaborated by the Israelis and the Americans as to how they're going to divide Iran
00:14:33.060 into different countries. What should theoretically be a peaceful imperial coexistence
00:14:41.700 is in fact impossible. So the Iranians restarted that war over the control over the Strait of 0.64
00:14:48.180 Hormuz and they initiated it by attacking a bunch of ships in the Strait of Hormuz in order to
00:14:55.940 assert that they control that waterway. And things escalated a little bit and then they calmed down
00:15:05.780 because the Iranians went to visit Oman and they spoke about the possibility of sharing
00:15:12.580 some control over the strait with one direction having to pay fees if you go via the Omani waters
00:15:21.100 and the other one having not to pay fees if you go through Omani waters and the other one if you
00:15:27.080 go through Iranian waters having to pay. The Iranians said no and instead what they did was 0.81
00:15:33.680 that they launched a bunch of attacks on the region, including on Musandam. Musandam is this 0.96
00:15:40.980 piece of territory here. It's a governorate within Oman. It's the territory of Oman that sits on the
00:15:48.580 Strait of Hormuz. And if you look back, this territory became part of Oman because the British
00:15:56.300 in 1970 decided that it should. It was Britain's way of maintaining an imperial toehold.
00:16:03.680 And obviously, as with all British imperial possessions, it passed on to the Americans. 0.51
00:16:10.400 And so the Iranians launched a series of attacks, including against Musandam.
00:16:14.480 There are some reports that they hit the Wasit governorate, the middle governorate, which has this Dukhum port inside it.
00:16:26.040 Dukum port is intended to provide an alternative shipping route into the Gulf that bypasses Hormuz,
00:16:33.820 and so the Iranians hit that, right after having had some negotiations with the Omanis.
00:16:40.680 The Iranians also hit a bunch of military bases in Kuwait, of course, and in Bahrain, and in Qatar,
00:16:48.800 and in Jordan, but supposedly they didn't hit Saudi Arabia.
00:16:55.340 Now, we don't know if they hit Saudi Arabia, but it wasn't declared,
00:16:58.640 or if they chose to keep the Saudis out of it for now.
00:17:02.540 And we will talk about the Saudis and how they're going to get hit in a few minutes. 0.99
00:17:08.320 So they hit all of these territories. 0.75
00:17:10.040 But for me, some of the more interesting strikes happened in Kuwait. 0.76
00:17:14.320 Because weirdly enough, the Iranians seem to have struck some border posts in Kuwait.
00:17:21.080 And if you look at that, well, Kuwait is right across from Basra.
00:17:26.720 It used to be called Kut al-Basra, the port of Basra or the something of al-Basra.
00:17:33.460 Basra being in Iraq and Basra having a major concentration of Iraqi militias
00:17:38.460 and being right across from the border with Kuwait,
00:17:43.280 you know, the Iraqis have always believed that Kuwait should be part of their territory.
00:17:47.160 For the Iranians, this makes sense to want to expand into Kuwait because from Kuwait you get to Basra and then you attack the major oil facilities in Abadan, right across the border with Iraq. 0.93
00:18:07.640 People forget how concentrated these assets are, that you have Basra and the oil export terminal here, you have Kuwait with the Ahmadi port and a huge oil export capacity there, and you have Abadan, which links to Kharig Island, which is where a lot of the Iranian exports happen.
00:18:27.940 And this was obviously the scene of the Khurram Shahr battle between Iraq and Iran, which was territory that the Iranians almost lost to the Iraqis before pushing them out.
00:18:42.960 So you've got this long history in this region, and then you see the Iranians attacking border positions in Kuwait.
00:18:50.300 logically speaking they have no chance of launching a ground attack against kuwait 0.72
00:18:56.820 because the minute that they mobilize they get slaughtered from the air
00:19:00.280 so i'm not sure what exactly it is that they're thinking but they're doing it and normally you
00:19:09.500 do this kind of thing in advance of wanting to send some very suicidal ground troops i don't
00:19:17.760 know exactly what the Iranians are thinking. But the other thing that happened was that the Iranians
00:19:22.540 also attacked some of the offshore facilities in Kuwait, some of the offshore oil extraction
00:19:29.580 facilities in Kuwait. And if you look at the geography, it's ridiculously easy for the
00:19:36.480 Iranians to fire drones into any Kuwaiti offshore assets. Kuwait doesn't produce a lot of offshore
00:19:44.000 oil however it's not that important where offshore becomes insanely important is in qatar
00:19:54.000 because you have here the uh north dome field in qatar which is the same gas uh reservoir as the
00:20:03.280 south parse field in Iran. I want to show you these very large oil drilling rigs that are situated in
00:20:17.680 the middle of the sea. This is where the Qataris get their gas. So the way that I read it was that
00:20:24.800 the Iranians were sending a signal to the global market saying that, yeah, we can start lobbying 0.75
00:20:33.280 one-way drones against these offshore facilities in Qatar, and if that happens, the Qataris won't
00:20:41.100 be exporting any gas for many, many years. So I thought it was interesting that the Iranians 0.99
00:20:49.020 were playing their hand that way. And the Iranians are also hammering Bahrain, which, as you will 0.96
00:20:56.920 remember is 60-70% Shia, and they claim it as the 18th province of Iran and believe that it should
00:21:04.560 be part of their territory. This obviously is the nightmare for Saudi Arabia because Saudi oil comes 0.99
00:21:12.080 from this region in the east of the country, and that has also got a pretty large and very unhappy 1.00
00:21:20.080 Shia population. And if the Iranians get a toehold here in Bahrain, they can expand it into 1.00
00:21:26.780 Saudi Arabia. So it looks like the Iranians are signaling that they're going to destroy Bahrain 0.98
00:21:34.360 and Kuwait as these are their way of surrounding Saudi Arabia and getting some ground options 0.76
00:21:44.120 against Saudi Arabia. That's what it looks like to me. It doesn't mean that they can do this
00:21:49.580 because they don't have the capacity to just land troops into Bahrain. But if 60-70% of the
00:21:56.120 population is on your side, and the government is broken and broke, and everybody, the ruling
00:22:03.360 institutions are severely weakened, things look slightly different.