The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW LIVE： Realpolitik #56 ｜ Some Countries Will Cease to Exist

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host Firas Moadad and we have a lot to

00:00:07.120 talk about today. I want to talk a little bit about obviously the war in the Middle East,

00:00:12.840 what the Iranians are trying to do, how might that play out, how long will the war actually take

00:00:19.600 and then if we have time I want to talk a little bit about J.D. Vance's appearance on Joe Rogan

00:00:26.020 and to think through what the midterms mean in the context of the war and why Vance made this

00:00:34.040 appearance. So let's start maybe with the war. Now, what is happening is, you know, as discussed

00:00:42.160 last time, was that basically the Iranians didn't want to lose their control over the Strait of

00:00:47.820 Hormuz, the waterway that connects the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean. They started attacking 0.91

00:00:53.880 ships, knowing that the Americas would have to retaliate. The Americas retaliated. The war is

00:00:59.760 back on. Now what the Iranians are doing is that they are going through the American bases in the 0.97

00:01:06.240 region, and they've already caused enough damage in the Bahrain and Kuwait and the UAE and Qatar 0.98

00:01:16.600 to make these bases not inoperable, but not available for the use by American aircraft.

00:01:26.400 And the idea is that they will force the Americans to concentrate their forces further and further

00:01:34.000 away from Iran. And by doing that, it reduces the number of sorties that the Americans can fly 0.56

00:01:41.460 against the Iranians. At the same time, the Iranians are following another group of strategies. 0.85

00:01:49.440 We've seen them attacking Kuwait's water and desalination plants repeatedly.

00:01:57.480 Now, for most of the Gulf region, 90% of their water comes from these facilities.

00:02:02.940 They take water from the sea. They are also power generation units. They desalinate that water,

00:02:10.680 and send it into houses and bottle it into drinking water

00:02:15.320 and so on and so forth.

00:02:17.300 And that's 90% of the water supply. 0.99

00:02:19.820 So now what we're seeing the Iranians do is focusing on Kuwait

00:02:23.200 and they've attacked desalination plants three times there.

00:02:27.880 One or two plants that were attacked.

00:02:29.960 Some of them were forced offline

00:02:31.460 or their capacity was reduced to the extent

00:02:35.060 that the Kuwaiti government had to come out and say,

00:02:38.220 you need to reduce your consumption of power between the hours of 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.

00:02:46.320 These are the peak heat hours. They're also the main working hours in the country.

00:02:51.060 So this is a pretty substantial hit. And it means that the ability of Kuwait to keep on generating 1.00

00:02:59.560 both power and water has been reduced. And as with everything, nothing is permanently survivable.

00:03:07.680 If you keep on hitting a target enough times, eventually it will stop working permanently.

00:03:15.200 And these facilities were built over the Gulf, all over the Gulf, over a period of 50-60 years.

00:03:22.160 It takes a long time to build this kind of infrastructure, and it develops slowly,

00:03:27.680 and once it's destroyed, it's difficult to rebuild it. And with power and desalination,

00:03:33.280 The important part is that they are the prerequisite for any other kind of work

00:03:42.040 in a region where temperatures might go up to 50 degrees Celsius

00:03:47.500 and in a region that is a desert and insanely short on water.

00:03:52.640 So if you don't have functioning water desalination plants and power plants,

00:03:58.760 you can't have air conditioning and you can't have water.

00:04:01.600 And that means that until you restore these facilities, you can't fix the energy infrastructure.

00:04:10.700 You can't fix the ports. You can't fix the airports, etc., etc.

00:04:16.420 They are a prerequisite for everything else. 0.96

00:04:20.000 And Kuwait is enormously vulnerable to Iran because of the distances involved. 0.89

00:04:25.400 It's just a very short stretch from Iranian territories here to Kuwaiti territories.

00:04:32.800 That makes it generally a lot more vulnerable.

00:04:35.940 But the Iranians aren't necessarily firing just from here. 0.92

00:04:38.940 They're firing from all over the region.

00:04:41.060 And in this kind of airspace, if you fly these drones a couple of hundred kilometers low over the water,

00:04:49.000 it's not going to be easy to detect them. 0.77

00:04:50.840 And if you're Iran, you will rinse and repeat the same process, mainly targeting Kuwait and then probably Bahrain and or the UAE. 0.93

00:05:01.780 And what that does is that it forces an exodus of the population, because for all of these countries, 90% of the population isn't native. 0.94

00:05:11.580 And for these expats, if they can't work, they'll have to leave. 0.52

00:05:15.420 the lowest level of workers, the people who are coming from the Indian subcontinent mainly,

00:05:23.740 these guys are kind of stuck. But for these economies to function, you have armies and 0.98

00:05:30.760 armies of Western expats and Egyptians and Palestinians and Lebanese and Moroccans and 0.86

00:05:39.020 Tunisians who are all there to earn a living. When you paralyze the economy

00:05:45.560 through repeated military strikes, but also through in particular strikes on

00:05:50.660 power plants and on desalination plants, you essentially force these people out.

00:05:56.480 And the ability of the economy to recover degrades accordingly. If you're

00:06:03.400 getting paid, I don't know, $10,000, $20,000 a month to live in the Gulf, you probably have a

00:06:10.220 decent nest egg and you don't want to risk your life and you don't want to live without power,

00:06:19.940 without air conditioning, without water. You cannot. You have to go. So what the Iranians

00:06:26.080 are signaling here is that if the Americans keep on attacking them, they are going to make Kuwait 0.97

00:06:32.200 uninhabitable and after kuwait it'll be bahrain and then the uae and then maybe qatar and then

00:06:39.800 maybe the eastern province of saudi arabia so essentially the states of the region collapse

00:06:47.560 they will no longer function as states if they don't have the two most basic things power and

00:06:55.240 water. And Kuwait is the particular focus for the Iranians because Kuwait is where the Americans

00:07:02.280 have most of their land forces. And if you make the country uninhabitable, you force the Americans 0.93

00:07:09.200 out, you collapse the government system, you cause all kinds of chaos there, and eventually 1.00

00:07:16.520 it just gets annexed by the Iraqis after the Americans leave. I've seen some speculation on

00:07:23.320 saying that the Iranians are going to launch a ground operation against Kuwait.

00:07:29.080 This is nonsense. They can't do this in a war. That's not what they're doing.

00:07:33.940 What they are in fact doing is basically making the state of Kuwait unviable and therefore not 0.68

00:07:42.060 worth protecting so that eventually when the war ends it falls in their lap. And they will do the 0.97

00:07:48.660 same for the UAE and they will do the same for Bahrain. And by doing that, and maybe Qatar at

00:07:55.040 some point, even though the relationship with the Qataris is a bit better. And once they've done 0.59

00:08:00.000 that, the strategic value of the region would have declined enormously because the oil wouldn't be

00:08:07.880 available for extraction because of the living conditions. Now, oil companies, when they have

00:08:14.660 free logistics and they're able to transport things into the middle of nowhere, they have

00:08:20.140 more resilience than anybody else. But if transportation is disrupted because aircraft

00:08:27.060 are being attacked, because airports are being hit, because trucks are being targeted, nobody

00:08:33.860 can do anything in that environment. So the Iranian threat here by targeting Kuwait and by 0.86

00:08:39.900 hitting power and desalination Kuwait, is that, look, we can make this entire region, 0.89

00:08:45.020 which is where the oil is, uninhabitable, without having to destroy the oil infrastructure itself.

00:08:53.160 And it forces a choice on the rulers of these countries. Do you want to have these prosperous

00:08:59.060 economies where you bring in these expats, and when you bring them in, you make an insane amount 1.00

00:09:06.520 of money off of them, even though you pay them very high wages? Or do you want to be broke 0.99

00:09:12.780 and have your countries broken? And therefore, it intensifies the pressure on the Gulf states

00:09:20.060 to pick a side. And we're already kind of seeing it work, because the Qataris are again howling, 0.99

00:09:26.360 trying to mediate some kind of ceasefire between the United States and Iran. 0.61

00:09:31.200 it doesn't look like it's going anywhere yet uh the americans will have to back down for that to

00:09:38.340 happen and the americans cannot leave the Strait of Hormuz in the hands of the iranians with the

00:09:45.180 iranians able to tax the countries of the region to use it and basically making them admit that

00:09:51.760 iran is the actual guarantor of security in the middle east for the americans this has become a

00:09:58.200 choice between a strategic defeat and humiliation and just trying to endlessly continue the war.

00:10:07.560 And because of pride, which is the devil's favorite sin, the Americans cannot simply say, 0.97

00:10:14.720 we're going to leave the region to the Iranians. Because the message that that sends to people like 1.00

00:10:20.220 the Ukrainians, to people like the Taiwanese, the Filipinos, the Baltic states, is that if the enemy

00:10:29.020 makes this war expensive enough and damaging enough, we will have to go. So the Iranians are 0.99

00:10:36.440 smashing the bases in the region, and they are escalating their attacks against infrastructure, 0.92

00:10:42.300 and they're using Kuwait as an example. Kuwait has in total eight water desalination plants,

00:10:50.660 The numbers differ across countries, but the rate of dependency on these power and desalination plants does not differ.

00:10:58.840 This is the Achilles heel of all of these countries. 0.96

00:11:03.820 And now that the Iranians have started doing it to Kuwait, the message is, we will do it elsewhere. 0.99

00:11:10.780 The other thing that's happening is that the Iranians are forcing the Americans back by targeting the bases in the region 0.94

00:11:18.140 and by dismantling the radars that are in the region which exist to protect the assets in each 0.85

00:11:26.900 of these countries in the Gulf, but also they are part of a networked radar system that helps

00:11:33.720 protect the Israelis. And what the Iranians are doing there is that they are just going through 0.97

00:11:39.320 the various bases in the region and attacking them repeatedly. And the latest and most frequent 1.00

00:11:44.640 target of attacks seems to be the Jordanians, with Jordan getting repeatedly hit by Iran

00:11:53.240 because it has four or five bases that are being used by the United States in order to

00:12:00.040 both defend Israel and conduct attacks against Iran.

00:12:04.220 And the fact that Jordan is now the focus reflects a couple of things.

00:12:08.320 It reflects the fact that the U.S. Air Force has had to move back from most territories in the region to Jordan and to Saudi Arabia. 0.59

00:12:18.780 And it reflects the slow degradation of defense capabilities that are available to the United States to keep on protecting the Israelis. 0.75

00:12:29.140 So the Iranians are doing two things with that. 0.98

00:12:31.240 they are wearing down the United States and they are signaling that the eventual target is going 0.97

00:12:41.520 to be the Israelis. For now, the Iranians are not attacking Israel. And we can talk about that in 0.62

00:12:49.440 the Q&A and discuss it in a little more detail. But not only are they attacking Jordan, they're

00:12:55.720 also inflicting casualties there. And the Iranians, interestingly, released a statement thanking the 0.98

00:13:02.160 Jordanians for sharing intelligence with them that led to the successful targeting of Americans. 0.77

00:13:09.620 This is partly psychological warfare, but if you know anything about the Jordanians, 0.60

00:13:16.700 their hatred for the... or there are elements in Jordan that deeply hate the Israelis and the

00:13:24.080 Americans and that are part of the Jordanian Armed Forces. And it wouldn't be too difficult

00:13:30.920 to imagine them sending some messages here and there to friends that they have in Iraq

00:13:37.040 to pass it on to the Iranians to say where exactly the American soldiers are.

00:13:45.620 That's a possibility. The other possibility is that the Russians and the Chinese

00:13:49.400 are helping the Iranians acquire information about the deployment of the American forces,

00:13:55.980 and then that's being used to target Jordan. So neither of these possibilities would surprise

00:14:01.880 me. I'm not taking a position in either of them. I don't know. But you see the confirmation here

00:14:08.640 from the New York Times that this is the strategy pursued by the Iranians, because they go over how

00:14:14.620 Jordan, which hosts major U.S. air bases, grew in importance in the run-up and the early days of the

00:14:20.320 war as the Pentagon shifted a number of troops from Bahrain, the UAE, and Qatar to relatively

00:14:26.140 more secure locations in Jordan and Israel. So what have the Iranians done? They've pushed

00:14:32.480 the Americans out of the bases that are here, that are right across from Iran, and they forced them

00:14:39.900 into Jordan and Israel, and into, I believe, bases in Saudi Arabia, near Mecca, and near Shadda.

00:14:51.540 Why? Because there's a lot more distance between that territory and Iran, so it's easier to detect

00:14:57.140 missiles, it's easier to interdict the missiles, it makes it harder for the Iranians to strike there.

00:15:03.340 But what we're seeing from Jordan is that this isn't going very well. And pretty much every

00:15:08.520 American base in Jordan in the last few days has been hit. Aqaba in the very south of the country

00:15:13.580 facing Eilat, that's been hit. In Azraq, there is the Muwafaq Salty airbase, that's been hit.

00:15:21.060 There is the King Faisal and Prince Hassan and King Hussein bases up and down the country. These

00:15:27.800 have been repeatedly hit. And so they're wearing down the capability of the Americans to deploy

00:15:33.920 there, intending to push them more and more into Israel. That seems to be the plan. And then 0.94

00:15:41.900 it's basically the last remaining target would be Israel, and they would just hammer at the 0.92

00:15:50.480 Israelis, knowing that the Israelis are low on air defenses and that the Americans are also

00:15:56.440 running low on air defenses. This seems to be what the Iranians are trying to do here. 0.99

00:16:03.920 And we see Al-Jazeera mentioning the strikes on desalination plants. 0.59

00:16:08.300 We see this kind of attack against military bases in Kuwait.

00:16:12.400 This is the Saad al-Abdallah Academy.

00:16:15.000 It's a training base mainly.

00:16:17.980 You see them blowing up oil infrastructure in Bahrain.

00:16:23.120 And again, the idea is to make, especially Bahrain and Kuwait, completely unviable estates.

00:16:32.160 Why Bahrain and Kuwait?

00:16:33.880 Well, because this is the eastern province of Saudi Arabia.

00:16:38.320 All of the oil of Saudi Arabia is somewhere in this area, in this big area here. 1.00

00:16:47.040 And if you make Kuwait and Bahrain non-viable, Bahrain is 70% Shia. 1.00

00:16:55.660 They'll overthrow the government, and they will align with the Iranians. 1.00

00:16:59.960 and kuwait is a stone's throw away from iraq if you make it dysfunctional the iraqis can one day

00:17:08.640 take it over not during the war because if the iranians tried to concentrate forces along the

00:17:15.040 border with iraq in order to invade kuwait they would be massively vulnerable from the air they'd

00:17:20.220 get decimated they don't have the air defense to do it but if you push the americans out of the

00:17:26.140 region, which is what the Iranian objective is, the Iranians end up surrounding Saudi Arabia's 0.52

00:17:34.200 eastern province on two directions. And with the Houthi in Yemen, the Saudi's position becomes

00:17:40.580 damn near impossible. This is what the Iranians are aiming at here. And now it seems that the 0.99

00:17:49.160 Iranians are saying that they're going to hit the UAE very badly. That makes a lot of sense because 1.00

00:17:55.480 of the deep connections between the UAE and Israel. As we've covered in the past, the main

00:18:03.220 Arab allies that the Israelis have are the UAE. The UAE believe that there is no conflict between

00:18:10.320 them and a greater Israel. If Israel expands and the countries of the region, say Saudi Arabia,

00:18:16.420 falls apart, then it's the UAE that believes that it can step in and basically move from

00:18:25.060 its borders up towards Qatar and the Saudi eastern province. They believe that they could

00:18:31.540 do that at some point in the future if the Saudis fall apart. And so they don't see a conflict

00:18:38.580 between them and Israel. Their banking sectors are completely intertwined. The UAE helps the

00:18:46.460 Israelis all over the region. So they're a reasonable target for the Iranians. And if they 1.00

00:18:54.220 start hitting desalination in the UAE, again, the expats leave. And they're stuck with just

00:19:01.420 some Indians and Palestinians and Lebanese who have nowhere else to go because their countries 0.98

00:19:06.840 are equally screwed. And that becomes a disaster for the Emiratis and therefore for the Israelis. 0.66

00:19:13.780 So you're seeing the Iranians apply this pressure on the region, and it can't work indefinitely 0.94

00:19:20.000 for the americans especially not with the kind of precise targeting that we're seeing them hit 0.78

00:19:28.360 uh the uh the jordanians with uh they've hit five transporters and merit and and uh maritime

00:19:40.060 patrol vessels that have been moved from bahrain so you move the americans move the assets from

00:19:47.160 close to Iran into Jordan, they still get hit. They still get damaged. Aqaba,

00:19:56.520 Hussein International Airport, again, it gets hit. And it is a real problem for the

00:20:03.880 United States because if they have to refuel over great distances and fly from

00:20:10.680 Europe, for example, or Israel, or Jordan itself, that ends up wearing down their equipment and

00:20:19.400 limiting the number of strikes that they can conduct against the Iranians.

00:20:24.360 And they managed to hit American helicopters in the east of the country. 0.91

00:20:32.920 That's a very high level of precision. 0.98

00:20:35.160 What this is showing is that the Iranians can pick their targets in current time and attack them. 0.86

00:20:43.840 Meaning that moving these assets around the region doesn't really change very much, 0.90

00:20:49.160 because once they are on the ground, the Iranians have the ability to collect that intelligence and attack. 0.91

00:20:55.300 and the thing to remember is that Jordan only exists to protect Israel the reason the British

00:21:09.460 carved out this country which never existed in the past and never was a country in the past

00:21:16.000 was basically because they needed a very friendly country that was completely dependent on external

00:21:23.980 aid to be a buffer between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. That's the job of Jordan. 0.76

00:21:32.380 So to reiterate, the parts of the Middle East that have traditionally built capable armies 0.99

00:21:42.380 and capable forces, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, the Arabs had one go, like the Arabs of Arabia 0.68

00:21:50.440 had one go in the early Muslim invasions.

00:21:53.640 The Egyptians do have a history,

00:21:56.220 but they were neutralized in the 1979 treaty,

00:22:00.420 and there was not much that the British could do

00:22:03.420 to weaken Egypt other than separate Sudan from it

00:22:07.260 and establish a country called Libya,

00:22:09.520 another geopolitical joke.

00:22:12.860 But Jordan is there mainly to stop an army from Syria

00:22:17.440 going south and into the sheer length of Israel, or to stop an army from Iraq going west and heading

00:22:26.720 towards Jerusalem. That's why Jordan exists. So with the Iranians now focusing their fire on Jordan 0.96

00:22:33.460 and ensuring that Jordan can't fulfill its function as a defender of Israel, 0.53

00:22:39.380 they make Jordan a lot less viable as a state because it's a very poor police state

00:22:44.600 that relies on an infinite amount of welfare from the West for it to keep functioning.

00:22:52.360 Without that backing from the West, without the aid that goes to Jordan,

00:22:56.980 in a few years' time, the country would be bankrupt.

00:23:00.140 And once it's bankrupt, the people rise up against the king because they view him as a traitor.

00:23:05.360 And then they join Syria or Iraq, and they become enemies of Israel. 0.88

00:23:10.960 So what the Iranians are aiming for with this missile strategy is really to change the geopolitics of the region and to take the states that have been most closely aligned with the West because they have no choice but to align with the West. 0.85

00:23:33.100 Like Kuwait, if it wasn't for American backing, the Iraqis or the Saudis would take it. 0.86

00:23:38.740 Bahrain, if it wasn't for American backing, the Saudis or the Iranians would take it.

00:23:43.060 Qatar, UAE, same thing. 0.98

00:23:46.960 So they're taking these states and they're attacking the infrastructure of these states 0.85

00:23:51.920 and the bases of these states in a way that threatens their long-term viability,

00:23:56.700 in a way that threatens the ending of their independence.

00:24:04.540 And if they're part of a bigger country, be it Saudi Arabia or Iran,

00:24:09.580 the Iranians then no longer have to worry about an American presence there.

00:24:14.420 They just have to worry about the existing neighbor. 0.84

00:24:18.860 That's the change that they're imposing. 0.59

00:24:21.780 And with Jordan, I mean, the number of power plants in Jordan is small. 0.61

00:24:26.700 The resources of the country are very poor, it relies on only one port, Aqaba, although obviously it trades with the Israelis and it can rely on Israeli ports, but basically they are just going through the American presence in the region and disabling it and forcing the Americas into Israel.

00:24:49.320 And if they hit critical assets in these countries, like Jordan, a huge chunk of its exports comes from phosphates.

00:24:57.200 You bomb the phosphates facilities that Jordan has, you bomb the ports from which the phosphates are exported,

00:25:04.260 Jordan enters into a massive financial crisis, an economic crisis, that quickly becomes destabilizing.

00:25:11.060 Bahrain, it relies on exporting refined products and aluminum.

00:25:15.260 They've hit both of these facilities.

00:25:17.500 Kuwait exporting oil, they've hit some of the oil,

00:25:20.300 and they're working their way through the desalination plants.

00:25:25.100 So what the Iranians are saying to the United States is,

00:25:28.480 we will change the geopolitics of the region fundamentally 0.99

00:25:32.580 if you don't stop attacking us. 0.99

00:25:35.920 And that is on top of the Iranian threat, 0.99

00:25:40.340 or of the Iranian proven capability 0.91

00:25:44.560 of shutting down the Strait of Hormuz

00:25:47.060 and causing a spike in oil prices,

00:25:49.240 which is still very manageable.

00:25:51.240 We are still dealing with $80, $90 oil

00:25:54.460 when really it would have been reasonable

00:25:57.860 to expect $150 oil on the back of this crisis.

00:26:04.300 And they're saying to the United States,

00:26:06.020 you have no choice but to back down.

00:26:08.100 Otherwise, we will dismantle the order 0.87

00:26:10.020 that you have built in the region to protect Israel. 0.87

00:26:13.060 That's the message. 0.67

00:26:14.560 And if the war continues, and it can easily continue, given that the Americans can't, or they believe that they can't, give up the Strait of Hormuz and leave Iran as the dominant power in the region, then these things become real possibilities.

00:26:32.360 the ending of these states that only exist because the British and the Americans say they should,

00:26:42.440 that becomes a very real possibility. And that favors Iran over the long term, regardless of 0.95

00:26:48.200 how much punishment they take in order to achieve that objective. So that's how they're playing their hand. 0.94

00:26:54.840 now some more imagery of what's getting smashed here this is interesting reporting here that came

00:27:05.000 out in march uh from a site called semaphore which says it specializes in intelligence

00:27:11.200 and what they are saying is that the israelis said to the united states that it's running

00:27:18.120 out of interceptors. And the reason that this matters is because as the Iranians go around

00:27:28.600 attacking the American bases in Bahrain and in Kuwait and the rest of the region and in Jordan,

00:27:36.520 one of the big targets has been radars. When you disable the radars, you shorten the reaction time

00:27:44.360 of the ultimate target, which at some point in this war is going to become Israel.

00:27:53.480 When you shorten that reaction time, you then force the air defense batteries to fire more

00:28:01.400 missiles at each target because they are less certain that they can intercept it.

00:28:07.560 So there's a logic here. There's a logic to keeping Israel until the very end. 0.93

00:28:14.360 If you go through this debasing strategy of preventing the Americans from functioning in their bases and disabling their radars, 0.96

00:28:23.580 you get to a point where when you attack Israel, you have to attack Israel with fewer missiles,

00:28:30.640 because every missile is going to require more interceptors. 0.52

00:28:34.520 Once the interceptors are depleted, you have an open field, and you can attack a lot more effectively.

00:28:42.620 that's the other part of the strategy so the iranians as best as i can tell are thinking

00:28:49.520 about this very systematically whereas when you look at the americans and what they are doing

00:28:55.040 strategically they said that they wanted to go into this war to stop iran from having a nuclear

00:29:00.240 program and to weaken the missile and drone programs okay ignoring the regime change bit

00:29:08.720 which Trump mentioned a couple of times and then dropped as part of his speaking points.

00:29:15.640 Okay.

00:29:17.720 The nuclear program, not much is happening there

00:29:22.320 because it seems that the Iranians have another facility close to Tabriz,

00:29:28.200 much deeper under the mountains, which hasn't been hit,

00:29:32.340 which might sit at a depth of 100 meters underground,

00:29:35.180 which is therefore probably immune to everything other than a tactical nuclear weapon and it's not

00:29:42.200 necessarily the case that a tactical nuclear weapon could penetrate 100 meters underground

00:29:47.940 like that facility is there and we don't know how much enriched uranium is in it

00:29:55.800 it's not completed but you can bet that the iranians are rushing to

00:30:02.140 make it functional and completed.

00:30:06.380 So on the nuclear program, there's nothing.

00:30:09.180 On the missile program,

00:30:10.880 obviously the strikes on Iranian industry and power

00:30:13.400 are going to have an impact

00:30:14.780 because you're weakening their industrial capabilities in general.

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - July 23, 2026

PREVIEW LIVE： Realpolitik #56 ｜ Some Countries Will Cease to Exist

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