The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Realpolitik #32 ｜ Iran war？

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to a new live episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Maudad.

00:00:06.740 As usual, this is another live episode. Please step in with any questions, comments that you

00:00:13.420 might have, and I will read them at the end as I normally do. Today, we are going to be talking

00:00:18.860 about the preparations for war with Iran. And why is this happening? What does it all mean?

00:00:25.800 And how does it look like ending up? Because striking Iran is a pretty complex task. 0.97

00:00:33.980 Now, as you can see from the map that Samson is showing you here, this is Iran and the wider

00:00:40.980 Persian Gulf region. Geographically, Iran looks like a fortress. It is not really invadable,

00:00:49.740 except for the southern part of the country, the southwestern part of the country, to be precise,

00:00:57.980 where you would need to build up a ground force in Iraq. And the reason that I say that is that

00:01:03.780 as you look at this map, you see that there are these endless mountain chains sort of protecting

00:01:11.560 the Persian heartland. And then there is this kind of salty desert here in the middle. And the logistics

00:01:19.960 of just sending ground troops into a country like that are incredibly difficult. That's why the Iraqis 1.00

00:01:27.560 struggled so much during the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq war, which was really focused on this area,

00:01:37.440 the flat area by Ahwaz that has a lot of Iran's energy resources, actually. And that is, in fact,

00:01:49.440 relatively invadable. Whereas beyond that, you hit these mountain chains. And then for any ground

00:01:57.260 force, it becomes incredibly difficult. So what we're looking at realistically is a series of

00:02:03.380 airstrikes. And the Americans have been building up their capabilities all over the region. CNN has a

00:02:11.760 decent summary of the buildup here. What you see first is a huge number of American bases and presence

00:02:22.360 all over the region. You also see the movement of the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group. You see a lot

00:02:32.800 of new aircraft that are there for surveillance. You see a significant number of destroyers and

00:02:44.560 aegis cruisers that are there to be able to intercept Iranian missiles and fire into Iran. You see a buildup

00:02:53.360 of multiple new air wings. And a lot of this buildup is actually focused on places like Jordan,

00:03:00.000 which is probably going to be the area from which the U.S. strike comes because you have this empty

00:03:09.480 airspace over Syria and Iraq where there isn't much air defense. You can get straight into Iranian 1.00

00:03:15.200 air defenses here. And the Iranians, in order to target Israel, have concentrated their own missiles 0.95

00:03:22.720 pretty much in this area and along the mountains here with a plan to be able to close the Strait of

00:03:30.940 Hormuz, which we're going to talk about, and with a plan to strike into American bases. Again, given the 0.92

00:03:39.180 distances, this is an ideal location to hit the bases in the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman. There's a naval refueling

00:03:47.680 station here. Kuwait has a bunch of American bases, all of these locations. So you see the Iranian missiles 0.56

00:03:56.900 are concentrated all along the west and south of the country, whereas a lot of the nuclear assets are

00:04:04.780 deeper inland, including in the vicinity of Tehran, the capital, which sits right around here where I'm

00:04:12.020 moving the mouse. So the Americas are engaged in this buildup. It looks like it's going to be an aerial

00:04:17.760 strike. They've deployed the kind of electronic warfare aircraft that they would need to be able

00:04:24.580 to do this. These are the EA-18 growlers, which sort of are helpful in suppressing enemy communications

00:04:34.000 and air defenses and air defenses and so on. And with those, the U.S. can try to shut down

00:04:41.240 communications. They've pre-positioned a lot of refueling aircraft. You need to refuel right outside

00:04:49.120 the Iranian airspace, go in, strike, go out, refuel again, and then return to bases. And the plan looks 0.60

00:04:59.440 like it's first to suppress Iranian air defense systems and then strike at various key targets

00:05:09.220 and then see what happens. And obviously, in anticipation of pretty big waves of Iranian missiles

00:05:19.720 coming in, the U.S. is boosting its air defense. And they've deployed new THAAD system, terminal high

00:05:27.260 altitude area defense. They've deployed Patriots, which proved to be ineffective against a lot of

00:05:32.020 the Iranian missiles. And they will use their own aircraft to intercept the drones, which travel 0.56

00:05:38.680 slowly over longer distances so they can be more easily intercepted this way. But it's worth remembering

00:05:45.840 a few things. The first thing is that the IRGC has been planning for the Americans trying to launch

00:05:57.160 a decapitation strike against Iran for some time. The IRGC is the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps.

00:06:05.860 It's not actually the Revolutionary Guard Corps. It's the Revolution Guard Corps, because it's supposed

00:06:11.700 to guard the revolution rather than just export it. But anyway, that's just a minor thing that gets on

00:06:19.560 my nerves when people mistranslate these kinds of terms. And part of their preparation has been to

00:06:25.600 decentralize their own command so that if the head leadership in Tehran were annihilated, the regional

00:06:33.440 branches of the IRGC would continue to operate and would remain in control of the country. And they

00:06:41.380 would be in various underground bases all over Iran. And from these bases, they would continue firing

00:06:50.560 until they got a command to cease fire, essentially. So they would be able to fight independently of the

00:06:58.060 command structure. And that's how we saw Hezbollah fighting against Israel, where after the various

00:07:04.740 decapitation strikes, which were incredibly successful, incredibly successful, on the ground, in terms of

00:07:12.340 ground fighting, and in terms of the short-range missiles, Hezbollah was not disrupted.

00:07:18.020 And what the Americans would hope to do would be to take out the air defense systems first.

00:07:24.520 And then, having taken out the air defense systems, they would then try to identify the entrances

00:07:31.340 of the underground bases that the Iranians have built, and pretty much seal the Iranians in their 1.00

00:07:39.480 bases. Now, these bases have logistics equipment to enable them to open new tunnel entrances,

00:07:45.800 even while a war was ongoing. But if you flood the zone with surveillance aircraft, you can detect when

00:07:54.140 this is happening. The issue really is an issue of scale. Because detecting Hezbollah opening new tunnel 0.88

00:08:02.980 entrances in an area as tiny as South Lebanon, here is South Lebanon, you're looking at a very small area,

00:08:12.120 40 kilometers wide, 40 kilometers long, absolutely tiny, is not comparable to identifying the possibility

00:08:22.800 of new tunnels being opened all along this geography, where some of the locations of the underground bases

00:08:30.900 would not actually be known to the attackers. And so that creates new complications.

00:08:37.620 And the Iranians went as far as to develop new kinds of concrete that would allow them to withstand 1.00

00:08:48.180 airstrikes, so that only the heaviest ordinance, which is in limited supply at the end of the day,

00:08:56.220 would be effective against their systems. So that's what you're dealing with. But then there's the

00:09:02.720 question of why is this happening? I mean, there's the United States on one side of the planet. 0.55

00:09:10.560 And there's Iran on pretty much the other side. And the Iranians don't want to close oil exports for

00:09:19.740 the region, because that means that their own oil exports can't go. And because it means that the

00:09:25.220 Chinese would go crazy, so they're fine to let the oil keep flowing, they're not really capable of 1.00

00:09:32.720 invading other countries around them. The U.S. can absolutely stop them from, say, you know, the fear

00:09:39.120 when Saddam invaded Kuwait was that Saddam would continue from Kuwait and then seize the eastern

00:09:45.400 province of Saudi Arabia, which is where the oil is, and continue from there to the UAE and be able to do

00:09:52.680 that and be able to sort of dominate the oil exports of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi, and the UAE. Qatar is not a

00:10:01.780 serious oil exporter. And through that, become immensely powerful and blackmail the world. The Iranians 1.00

00:10:08.160 are not in a position where they can invade these countries right now. Like, they just can't do it. And they

00:10:13.460 don't seem to have any plan to do it. So while the U.S. wants to make sure that nobody else controls all of

00:10:19.020 this oil, Iran isn't even trying to do that. And the answer is Israel. That's the only answer. And you see that 0.85

00:10:28.120 the top decision makers in Israel are heavily influenced by people like Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel,

00:10:35.300 obviously a Brazilian billionaire who is also a homosexual, whose former boyfriend met a sticky end

00:10:46.340 when he apparently fell from the 17th floor after having invited himself to a party that Peter Thiel and

00:10:56.000 his husband were holding. And Peter Thiel is obviously deeply connected to J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance was working

00:11:03.960 for Thiel early on in one of his hedge funds. And then it was Thiel that financed J.D. Vance's run for the

00:11:13.360 Senate. And then now J.D. Vance is the vice president. In the same way, Trump is financed by the Adelson

00:11:23.020 family, also a Brazilian family. He said that it was because the Adelson's paid him $100 million that he

00:11:32.180 recognized that the Golan Heights, which the Israelis took away from Syria in the 1967 war, are sovereign

00:11:40.140 Israeli territory. And then you have Marco Rubio, who was vetted by Larry Ellison, the owner of Oracle and now

00:11:50.420 TikTok, who basically made sure in his connection to Israel that Marco Rubio would be absolutely loyal

00:12:00.360 to the Israelis. And so he funded him against Trump in 2015 for the 2016 presidential campaign and has

00:12:08.700 been backing him ever since. So you see the situation where the influence of one particular group over

00:12:18.960 American foreign policy is so immense as to get them to engage in another Middle Eastern war, 0.99

00:12:25.120 even though Trump's whole rise to power was predicated on no more stupid wars in the Middle East. 0.99

00:12:32.840 Let's not get sucked into the Middle East again. We don't want to do that again. 1.00

00:12:38.240 So here we are. The Americans have pretty much placed the assets that they would need to place

00:12:43.860 if they were to go to war with Iran and they're ready. And now it's a question of, do they, don't they do it?

00:12:53.600 And I'm going to argue that there's a good chance that they don't do it.

00:12:58.020 Because unlike what I've seen on X, where there are allegations that the Epstein files were released

00:13:06.720 in order to embarrass Trump and force him to escalate on behalf of Israel against Iran,

00:13:15.540 my view is the opposite, really. My view is that the Epstein files make Israel look so bad

00:13:23.980 that it helps curtail Brazilian influence over American politics. And it helps Trump negotiate

00:13:34.720 with the Iranians more effectively and impose things on the Israelis that they wouldn't have 0.97

00:13:40.360 accepted. Now, before continuing, let's take a quick trip down memory lane.

00:13:47.220 From 2011 onwards, Barack Obama, Trump's predecessor, was doing everything he could to negotiate a deal

00:13:55.220 with the Iranians. And then you got, in 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,

00:14:01.400 which was supposed to exchange the full removal of sanctions on Iran for the partial dismantlement

00:14:11.180 of the Iranian nuclear program and placing the nuclear program under permanent international

00:14:18.280 surveillance. I say permanent, even though some provisions of the deal had a 10-year time limit.

00:14:25.700 But there was still enough there that would have allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency,

00:14:33.900 the UN watchbody that looks over nuclear affairs globally, to keep monitoring Iran and preventing Iran 0.98

00:14:42.580 from actually building a nuclear weapon. What happened afterwards? What happened was that without an

00:14:49.560 invitation from the President, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the American Congress and spoke

00:14:57.780 against the deal and tried to push Congress to fail the deal and to thwart it, except that Obama did not

00:15:06.880 sign it officially as a treaty, so it didn't have to go through the Senate. So to get around Obama trying to get

00:15:15.100 around Congress, what happened was that Congress passed a huge batch of sanctions against Iran

00:15:23.260 that were identical to the sanctions that Iran was under over the nuclear issue, except that they targeted

00:15:31.220 Iran for having the IRGC and backing militias in the region and having a missile program and so on,

00:15:39.100 meaning that Obama could sign a deal with the Iranians, but he couldn't fulfill his part of the bargain

00:15:46.540 and remove the sanctions, meaning that the deal was in fact never fully implemented.

00:15:53.660 So the Israelis have a history of being able to foil American presidents who want to make agreements with 0.64

00:16:04.000 Iran behind, not behind their backs, in opposition to what they perceive are their interests. 0.88

00:16:11.600 So with the release of the Epstein files, you kind of get something different,

00:16:18.160 which is that if you look at the Epstein files, you see a massive amount of influence

00:16:24.240 for Epstein and the rest of his ethnic network over policy globally,

00:16:31.200 that makes Israel looks really quite bad. And that can be used by Trump and by allies of Trump in order

00:16:41.600 to reduce the influence of the Israelis and be able to make some kind of agreement. So my take on the 0.87

00:16:48.640 Epstein stuff is pretty much the opposite. It doesn't hurt Trump as much as it hurts Israel. And in that sense,

00:16:58.080 it creates some kind of opportunity for a deal, given that the Iranians now see that the Americans are 0.55

00:17:06.800 ready to go to war. So that's one thing that I wanted to get across in this. And the Americans have,

00:17:14.640 you know, two options. Either they bomb Iran or try to color revolution Iran. 0.85

00:17:21.680 And to some extent, the protests that we saw in Iran showed that the color revolution option has failed.

00:17:29.200 Because it wasn't just the Iranian security forces killing protesters. They did that. They absolutely killed protesters.

00:17:38.480 But then you see some reports online saying that the Iranians actually killed 80,000 protesters.

00:17:43.200 What? That just doesn't pass any kind of sniff test. And if you look at the trajectory of the figures

00:17:52.080 during the Iran protests, which happened, they ended, I think, one or two weeks ago,

00:17:57.200 and had gone on for around three or four weeks, you saw the first death toll saying 500 and then 1,500.

00:18:04.560 Okay. And then 2,000. Okay. And then it jumped to 3,000. Fine. Then it jumped to 20,000.

00:18:13.680 And then it jumped to 80,000. And again, if you go back memory lane, you will remember that when

00:18:23.280 in 1990 and 1991, the Americans were trying to justify kicking Iraq out of Kuwait after Saddam had invaded,

00:18:33.120 you had these lurid stories about the Iraqi soldiers killing babies in incubators in Kuwait.

00:18:40.640 And you had then obviously the weapons of mass destruction stories in 2003.

00:18:46.800 And you had the stories about the Russians kidnapping 20,000 Ukrainian children.

00:18:53.600 All of these things never actually happened. Like it just didn't happen.

00:18:58.640 And now you're seeing this dynamic where you see people who are very supportive of Israel

00:19:04.960 saying that there were armed protesters in Iran and saying that the protesters,

00:19:13.760 this is from Mossad commentary, saying that the protesters are in open revolution and are seizing weapons

00:19:20.080 and attacking the government. And you see this kind of stuff and you go, well, hold on a second.

00:19:25.600 And this was an attempt at colour revolutions. And that's what actually happened. And the colour

00:19:33.840 revolution failed. And so the regime survived. And since the colour revolution failed, the only two 0.71

00:19:42.080 possibilities here now are a negotiation with the existing regime or going to war.

00:19:49.040 If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the Lotus Eaters, head to our website where you can find more.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - February 04, 2026

PREVIEW： Realpolitik #32 ｜ Iran war？

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