The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - September 30, 2025


PREVIEW： Realpolitik #14 ｜ Another War With Iran？

Topics
Iranian nuclear deal and sanctions reimposition
Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Netanyahu Trump Firas Maudad Bob Amelaius Tom Brokaw Aaron Burr Patriot Yaks
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1262 The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1264

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

143.77

Word count

1,819

Sentence count

107

Harmful content

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Firas Moadad talks about the possibility of a resumption of the war with Iran, and whether or not Trump will go ahead with such a move. He is joined by the Director of the Israeli Defense Ministry, Avigayim Chumash, who says that the Iranians are feeling humiliated and are looking for a way to shift the blame.

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 Moadad.
00:00:05.400 Today we're going to talk about the possibility of a resumption of the war with Iran
00:00:11.960 and whether or not Trump will actually go ahead and do it.
00:00:16.240 Reminder, this is a live episode. Our apologies for the delay in starting,
00:00:21.380 but it does mean on the plus side that you can ask any questions that you want
00:00:24.740 and I'll be doing my best to answer your questions either as they come in
00:00:28.980 or at the end of the show, subject to assistance from Samson.
00:00:34.420 So we've been hearing some noise in Israeli media saying that a war with Iran is going to resume
00:00:40.260 and I won't go through all of the headlines. I'll focus instead on the most important person to say it,
00:00:47.060 who is the director of the defense ministry in Israel, so somebody who would be in the know.
00:00:52.100 And his view is to shift the blame on the Iranians, saying that they feel humiliated
00:00:59.520 and they're investing huge sums of money in accelerating their force buildup.
00:01:05.780 And indeed, all of the reporting on social media seems to sort of suggest this.
00:01:10.260 We're seeing shipments from Russia coming into Iran.
00:01:14.360 We saw the Iranian defense minister visiting China, presumably with the objective of acquiring some air defense systems
00:01:23.080 to make up for the fact that Iranian air defense really underperformed quite badly during the June conflict.
00:01:31.000 But the mood in Israel suggests that there's another round coming.
00:01:35.080 And if we were to look at some of the other indicators that might tell us whether or not this is something that's going to happen,
00:01:44.220 it seems that the United States has reinforced the terminal high-altitude air defense systems
00:01:50.680 that were deployed in Israel with four new launchers added to the six pre-existing ones.
00:01:59.900 So that's a pretty big increase.
00:02:01.700 If you remember, the Patriot systems really underperformed against Iranian missiles.
00:02:09.500 And so the Israelis moved the Patriots to Ukraine, which is a lesser priority for the United States.
00:02:16.440 And the United States moved more THAAD systems to Israel with a view towards basically enabling a better air defense for the Israelis.
00:02:28.400 That seems to be the priority right now.
00:02:31.700 And these would be aimed both at attacks from the Houthi as well as from Iraq and Iran.
00:02:38.760 Not just that, I think more worryingly, it seems that the United States is moving aerial tankers to Europe.
00:02:46.440 If you look at the numbers, the first reports that I showed you said eight.
00:02:52.480 But I think I see more than eight on this graphic here from the enforcer saying that more and more systems are being moved towards Europe
00:03:03.140 And therefore, they would be closer to the theater in the Middle East, where they would play a role in refueling aircraft to enable more strikes on Iran.
00:03:15.760 So these are pretty strong indicators.
00:03:21.060 And last, we have the Pizzeria and Gay Bar indicator.
00:03:25.680 The Pentagon Pizza Report, it's a great little account.
00:03:29.840 It doesn't always get it right, but it's a strong indicator.
00:03:33.260 When you see the Pentagon ordering a lot of pizzas on a Sunday night, it's a reason to worry.
00:03:40.500 And when you see the Gay Bar that a lot of people in the Pentagon seem to go to being quite empty, it's a sign that something is cooking.
00:03:51.680 That seems to point to some brewing preparations for escalation.
00:04:00.640 Now, the context for this is that today, I think in around an hour's time or less than an hour, Trump and Netanyahu are set to meet.
00:04:08.680 Trump is trying to force a peace agreement between Israel and Gaza, Israel and Hamas and Gaza, that would end the war there.
00:04:18.460 The war, as you know, has been quite costly in terms of the reputation of Israel and in terms of the media war that Israel is fighting.
00:04:28.080 The level of popularity of the Israelis has never been lower among most demographic groups in the United States and in the West.
00:04:37.300 And Netanyahu will be saying, rather than ending the war in Gaza, he wants to go after the Iranians one more time in order to solve the issue with the nuclear program. 0.69
00:04:48.460 So, if you remember, the nuclear program was not really destroyed by any means.
00:04:57.500 What is being said by the Israelis now is that they know where the highly enriched uranium that Iran has is hidden.
00:05:08.920 They think that the ability to enrich uranium might still be there.
00:05:14.480 Netanyahu says that the aim of the June war was to destroy that.
00:05:18.640 But the Iranians are saying they have other secret facilities that nobody knows about.
00:05:23.440 So, the nuclear issue of Iran is really not resolved.
00:05:29.120 And in Lebanon, Hezbollah is rebuilding.
00:05:32.420 Talk about Hezbollah disarming completely. 0.95
00:05:35.760 They're never going to do it willingly.
00:05:38.320 And unless they're actually invaded and thrown out of the country, they're not going to do it.
00:05:44.060 They're just going to work on rebuilding their capabilities with any means that they can.
00:05:48.340 Yesterday, I was listening to the Secretary General of Hezbollah saying that, you know, we are well on our way to recovery.
00:05:56.420 We are ready for another round for the Israelis if it's forced on us. 1.00
00:05:59.660 So, as I said a couple of months ago on my blog on Madagio politics, nothing has really been resolved when it comes to Iran.
00:06:09.560 They took a big hit.
00:06:11.340 They were humiliated.
00:06:13.280 It was demonstrated that their airspace is quite vulnerable.
00:06:17.140 But nothing really changed.
00:06:19.580 The regime is still there.
00:06:20.800 In a way, it got stronger because it was attacked from outside.
00:06:25.280 And there doesn't seem to be a resolution.
00:06:30.100 Rather, instead, what we're seeing is that sanctions on Iran have been reimposed by the United Nations.
00:06:38.020 If you remember the details of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal between Iran and the West, or between Iran and the Security Council plus Germany,
00:06:50.920 what was done was that there was a mechanism established whereby just one of the countries involved could cancel the whole deal.
00:07:01.720 And that was referred to as the snapback mechanism.
00:07:04.580 The Europeans activated that snapback mechanism in August.
00:07:08.620 And now Iran is again under full UN sanctions.
00:07:12.740 But they're going to keep on selling oil to China.
00:07:16.160 They're not going to stop anything that they're doing.
00:07:18.300 And I can't imagine that in this environment, the Russians and the Chinese will stop backing Iran.
00:07:27.080 Rather, I think every indicator shows that they're going to double down, which is why we are seeing these Antonov heavy lift aircraft going from Russia into Iran.
00:07:37.140 Supposedly, they're carrying either air defense systems or Yak-130 training aircraft.
00:07:44.820 Or maybe, you know, there are reports that MiG-29s are now in Iran with a view towards supplying them with Sukhoi-30s.
00:07:53.540 The Yaks are an interesting one because these are a trainer aircraft. 1.00
00:07:57.420 So they're not going to do very much against Israeli jets.
00:08:01.300 What they could be used as, however, is platforms from which to launch missiles to interdict Israeli ordnance.
00:08:11.220 I'm just speculating here.
00:08:13.960 I'm not an expert in this field.
00:08:15.260 If you guys want to correct me or tell me what they can and can't do, I'd be quite interested.
00:08:22.220 But their training aircraft, they are used sometimes to fire ordnance.
00:08:26.340 I wonder if they can be used in some kind of support for air defense capacity.
00:08:31.500 Or I wonder if they can be used as platforms on which to place radars.
00:08:37.260 And these radars would then enable the Iranians to have better visibility over their airspace and integrate with on-the-ground air defense systems.
00:08:46.900 If somebody knows the details of this, I'd be extremely interested.
00:08:51.240 But anyway, it seems that the Russians and the Chinese are busy rearming Iran and trying to boost its air defense systems.
00:09:02.040 And if you're Israel or the United States and you see that the Iranian nuclear program is not destroyed,
00:09:08.420 that Iran is still very strong in Iraq and that its strength in Lebanon is nowhere near what it used to be,
00:09:15.820 but it's recovering, then as the American special envoy to Turkey and to Syria said,
00:09:23.560 Tom Barak, you have to go after the head of the snake, which means going after Iran. 1.00
00:09:30.260 And so one wonders if this is on the cards and if these indicators, the moving of refueling tankers,
00:09:37.940 the boosting of air defense systems, and the pizza indicator and the gay bar indicator, 0.58
00:09:47.180 I wonder if these are actually meaningful.
00:09:50.700 Somebody saying that MiG-29s were intimidating in like 1975.
00:09:54.720 Yes, yes.
00:09:55.580 Obviously a MiG-29 doesn't stand a chance against an F-35.
00:09:58.980 My question on the technical side is whether or not they can be used as platforms from which to launch air-to-air missiles
00:10:09.080 to interdict some of the Israeli ordinance, because the Israelis quite often fire from a distance.
00:10:17.540 And so the ordinance is more interceptable than the F-35.
00:10:21.360 That's my technical question.
00:10:24.220 So I don't know the answer to that.
00:10:27.280 I'm very keen to see your answer to that.
00:10:31.620 Bob Amelaius, I think that's the name that I'm looking at.
00:10:35.320 So we're seeing this movement here towards escalation.
00:10:40.580 And then you have to ask yourself, well, can there be a negotiated settlement?
00:10:44.980 And the answer is pretty much no.
00:10:48.640 The initial strike on Iran in June was being planned during the last round of negotiations.
00:10:55.300 It preempted planned Iranian-American negotiations over the nuclear issue in Oman by two days.
00:11:05.420 So the Iranians were supposed to go into talks with the United States on June 16, I think.
00:11:13.400 And then a couple of days before that, the Israelis struck. 0.96
00:11:16.440 And from the Iranian perspective, that meant that talks were being used as cover to prepare for military action.
00:11:25.380 And then we saw the same thing happening in Doha, in Qatar.
00:11:29.720 The Hamas team assembled to negotiate a peace proposal from the Americans,
00:11:34.640 and the Israelis tried to wipe out the Hamas team.
00:11:38.940 It kind of makes it very difficult to negotiate, no?
00:11:41.420 I mean, how are you going to go into talks when you expect to be attacked at any moment?
00:11:47.920 And when the Israeli objective is to sort of resolve this militarily?
00:11:53.080 I don't know, and I don't see how this gets resolved, really.
00:12:00.400 Either the Israelis accept that the Iranian regime survives and rearms Hezbollah and is still strong in Iraq 0.88
00:12:08.720 and can still strike them one day and still has the ability to build a nuclear weapon at will, I would argue,
00:12:16.920 or they let the issue go.
00:12:19.020 They're not letting a lot of things go right now, and understandably so.
00:12:25.680 They view Iran as an existential threat, and they want to simply destroy that threat once and for all. 0.94
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