The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - March 03, 2026


PREVIEW： Realpolitik #36 ｜ Open-Ended War


Episode Stats


Length

26 minutes

Words per minute

138.90953

Word count

3,740

Sentence count

202

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

49

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Firas Madaad breaks down the American strategy against Iran and explains why it's not so bad compared to the other options the U.S. has been trying to implement for a long time. He also talks about why the Iranians have been preparing for this outcome since the 1980s.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Madaad.
00:00:08.600 What's been going on? Has anything interesting happened? Well, very unfortunately, it seems that
00:00:15.980 something too interesting has happened. My condolences to the nothing ever happens crowd.
00:00:21.740 I'm very sorry for your losses. And now we're in the middle of a regional war in the Middle East
00:00:28.380 where the Iranians have decided that they are going to take the energy Samson option in order
00:00:34.760 to force the United States and Israel to back down. This is a bit of a disaster, shall we say, 0.73
00:00:43.600 for the rest of the world because the Americans don't really have a strategy. To the best of their 0.89
00:00:50.980 ability to explain it, the Americans have been saying that what they're trying to do is on the
00:00:56.960 tactical level, destroy the Iranian missile program, destroy the Iranian nuclear program,
00:01:02.960 and destroy the Iranian Navy. And on the strategic level, Trump has been saying that maybe the
00:01:09.460 military will decide to defect, or maybe there is going to be a change in regime. And P. Texas is
00:01:16.520 saying we're not after a regime change war, but the regime has changed because obviously they killed
00:01:22.660 the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was, for all of his many, many faults,
00:01:28.880 an excellent poster on X. Let's go through the American strategy and break it down into pieces.
00:01:35.180 When it comes to the nuclear program, there's a reason this damn thing is built under massive 0.96
00:01:40.540 mountains that are not penetrable to aerial attack. The Americans already tried to destroy the 0.91
00:01:47.460 nuclear program. Trump said that it was absolutely obliterated, that it was erased, etc., etc., and
00:01:53.220 that everybody who was saying otherwise is spreading fake news. So if it didn't get destroyed
00:02:00.900 with the first B-2 strikes, which were not tested by the Iranians, why would it be destroyed this time?
00:02:08.960 Obviously, the program can be weakened. It can be set back. All kinds of damage can occur. But destroying
00:02:15.460 the nuclear program from the air isn't really very viable because the Iranians have always known 1.00
00:02:21.620 that the nuclear program can be attacked from the air. That's why the damn thing is built under 0.98
00:02:26.660 mountains. When it comes to destroying the Iranian missile program, well, we have to look at the Yemen 1.00
00:02:34.740 example. The Houthi in Yemen control this corner of the country. This area around Sana'a, starting around
00:02:43.560 Ibb here and extending to Ma'arib and going all the way north. And a lot of this area is entirely useless.
00:02:51.240 The Americans spent 45 days, if I remember correctly, pounding Yemen and couldn't stop it from 1.00
00:03:00.120 firing more missiles at their ships. The Americans simply declared victory, said that they reached an
00:03:07.560 agreement with the Yemenis so that they'd stop attacking American assets and allowed the Houthi to 0.94
00:03:13.000 continue closing the Bab al-Mandeb Strait here against Israel. When you think about Iran, it's not exactly a
00:03:22.680 besieged country. It's massive. It's a dozen times the size of northern Yemen, easily. And most importantly, 0.96
00:03:32.840 it has an open supply line to Russia and China. You have the Caspian Sea here, you have one of the
00:03:40.040 terminals of the Belt and Road here in Kazakhstan, and you have Russian ports here on the Volga,
00:03:47.000 meaning that the Chinese and the Russians can keep supplying Iran indefinitely, getting their weapons to
00:03:54.120 Iranian ports in the Caspian, and then allowing the Iranians to continue with more limited missile
00:04:00.520 manufacturing. Obviously, given that their skies are open to American and Israeli attacks, this won't be
00:04:07.240 that easy. But the skies of Yemen were equally open to American and Israeli attacks. And the Yemenis were 0.98
00:04:15.000 able to continue developing, using, firing missiles at Israel, despite being bombarded. So that's the
00:04:24.760 second leg of the strategy. The third leg of the strategy is destroying the Iranian navy. Now, this is 0.93
00:04:32.680 actually pretty easy. The Iranian navy isn't so much a navy in the modern sense of the world, in that they
00:04:41.320 have aircraft carriers and big destroyers and so on and so forth. They have a few flagships. These look like
00:04:48.440 they've been already eliminated by American airstrikes. And then what they rely on is an endless amount of
00:04:57.080 small boats that can carry anti-ship missiles, like limited range anti-ship missiles. They rely on unmanned
00:05:07.080 maritime vehicles that could be fired or launched from anywhere on the Iranian coast. And they rely on
00:05:13.800 drones to attack the Strait of Hormuz. So destroying the Iranian navy such as it is, is very easy in some 1.00
00:05:25.240 sense, very difficult in another sense, because they can keep firing these unmanned marine vehicles and
00:05:32.040 these drones with the intention of attacking shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. So the three tactical legs
00:05:40.040 of the American strategy against Iran don't actually make a lot of sense. If they did,
00:05:48.120 they would have done it a long time ago. And the Iranians have been preparing for precisely this 1.00
00:05:53.400 outcome since the 1980s, when their navy was initially destroyed in the praying mantis operation.
00:06:02.600 And these kinds of small boats in the Gulf, they are a massive headache for everyone.
00:06:07.800 And the Iranians can keep attacking from within the Gulf and then using the geography of this region, 1.00
00:06:16.600 which is incredibly mountainous. I mean, just look at the terrain here. It's mountains all around.
00:06:22.600 They can just pop out of a cave, fire something into the water and withdraw. And it doesn't have to have
00:06:28.120 a particularly impressive range, meaning that they can do this for a pretty long time, especially with an
00:06:36.840 open supply chain to China. At the strategic level, Trump is saying the Iranian people will rise up,
00:06:44.920 they will take control of the country, it's not our job to plan for the day after, and maybe the
00:06:50.920 Iranian military will defect. Let's think about this, because unfortunately, Trump is retarded. 0.99
00:07:01.240 The military won't defect. If they survive this war, they will claim to have defeated the United States. 0.99
00:07:10.520 And they will use that to do the transition that always happens in Islamic countries, 0.86
00:07:15.480 which is to go from an official religious rule to a less official military rule, which was already the
00:07:21.560 case in Iran. Plus, even though a lot of the leadership has already been taken out, including
00:07:27.640 the supreme leader, it seems that the constitutional mechanisms of Iran have functioned. And now there is
00:07:34.280 a triumvirate, including the president, the head of the judiciary, and a scholar from the Guardian
00:07:39.720 Council, who have replaced Khamenei. And a gentleman by the name of Ali Larijani, who used to be a
00:07:47.560 commander in the IRGC, and who used to be the speaker of the Iranian parliament, and who's very connected
00:07:54.360 across the Gulf region, to the Russians, and to the entire Iranian establishment, which backs the regime.
00:08:01.960 He's now the guy in charge. Plus, the Iranians have moved to what is referred to sometimes as a 1.00
00:08:07.800 mosaic defense. Because they know that their communications are monitored, they've allowed 0.99
00:08:13.960 every IRGC base to sort of operate quasi-independently. They're probably communicating using
00:08:21.480 a sealed-off network going underground, a land network going underground, or through couriers,
00:08:29.960 and they're using the massive geography of Iran to just continue with their operations. And that
00:08:36.840 means that they can keep firing until they're actually satisfied. So what have the Iranians done, 1.00
00:08:43.480 and what does their strategy look like, counter to the American strategy?
00:08:47.640 Well, for one thing, they've sort of holed up in the mountains, as this video shows.
00:08:59.320 I mean, just take a look here.
00:09:00.840 This is a cave in the mountains, with dozens of drones, missiles, pretty much everything that they
00:09:12.120 need. This kind of looks like a runway, and I wouldn't be surprised if they can launch from within the
00:09:17.960 mountain. And by doing that, they are readying themselves to fight an incredibly long war.
00:09:25.320 Now, the first target of this war, to my surprise to some extent, I mean,
00:09:32.760 look, these are sort of short-range missiles that are stockpiled there.
00:09:37.000 One of the first targets of this war has been energy infrastructure.
00:09:44.760 And the Iranians are going around pretty much wrecking as much of the energy infrastructure in 1.00
00:09:53.240 the Middle East as they can. This is Rast al-Nura in Saudi Arabia, one of the world's biggest oil
00:09:58.840 refineries. A huge amount of oil goes through it and then gets exported as products,
00:10:04.440 and it's on fire. They've attacked Ras Laffan in Qatar and Msaid. These are two facilities that are
00:10:13.080 responsible for liquefied natural gas production. Qatar exports around a quarter of global natural gas,
00:10:21.400 and that's been cut. And they have the option of continuing to attack energy infrastructure with
00:10:28.440 the objective of either forcing these regional companies to declare force majeure and therefore
00:10:35.480 go into a kind of energy embargo against the world, or they will just destroy things in the region
00:10:43.480 endlessly with pinprick drone attacks because the range is quite short and they can do this with the
00:10:49.880 drones that you saw headed in the mountains. And they will continue to do this until they make the
00:10:55.320 the Gulf states cry uncle and tell the Americans you have to leave our country, you can't use our 1.00
00:11:03.000 airspace, we are cutting ourselves off from you. And even if the Gulf does that, the Iranians could 1.00
00:11:11.880 decide to continue attacking. So they've declared essentially total energy war. Their own energy is
00:11:18.440 getting bombarded, which is why I thought they would hesitate about taking that option. But they decided,
00:11:25.160 no, screw it. We would rather the entire region burn to the ground than us lose power, which theologically
00:11:35.160 is a very Shia way of thinking. The Shia tend to think in terms of them bringing down everything on 1.00
00:11:42.440 themselves so that they wouldn't have betrayed Hussein a second time. I can explain that in the Q&A later.
00:11:48.360 I can explain the theology a little bit later. And by the way, if you have any questions, just post them
00:11:53.800 and I'll go through them as usual. But the Iranians have decided that they're going to go for total energy 1.00
00:11:59.960 war. Now, the Israelis are saying that the rate of fire in Iran has actually increased, not decreased.
00:12:08.680 And we've seen some of the Iranian missiles being fired with a kind of shield of projectiles around it
00:12:15.720 that are intended to confuse air defense systems. And the key issue is the air defense systems that the West has,
00:12:23.560 that the Americans and the Israelis on the Gulf have. They don't have anywhere near enough. 0.99
00:12:29.880 And the Iranians can keep on firing until they deplete these. 1.00
00:12:34.120 And then when that happens, their own production capacity will be depleted as well, of course,
00:12:40.040 because it's getting bombed right now. But what also happens is that the missiles that they do fire
00:12:48.360 are less likely to have interceptors available to deal with them. So the Iranian plan seems to be, 0.83
00:12:55.400 we're going to keep firing indefinitely. And that's a real problem because of the shortage of air
00:13:02.520 defense missiles. Now, the earlier estimates were that the Americans have enough to launch a very
00:13:08.760 intensive bombing campaign for eight days. This could be wrong. I mean, the US is a huge country with a
00:13:15.000 massive defense industry. They could fire a lot. But in particular, when it comes to the terminal high
00:13:21.960 altitude air defense, the THAAD systems, which are the only ones that have a chance in hell of
00:13:27.160 intercepting the Iranian hypersonic missiles, they don't have enough. They produce 10 or 12 every year.
00:13:35.640 A quarter of those was depleted already in the 12-day war in June. And the Iranians have fired more 0.96
00:13:44.360 in the past couple of days than they did during the 12-day war.
00:13:48.360 So the Iranian rate of fire is much higher. And the intention behind that is to deplete these missile 1.00
00:13:56.600 systems so that even though the Iranian manufacturing is going to get eroded, when they get resupply from
00:14:03.960 China and Russia, that resupply is facing a lot less obstacles to hitting its targets.
00:14:13.800 The Iranians, which explains why the Iranians have refused negotiations. So, so far, 0.99
00:14:21.560 reporting has it that Trump reached out through the Italians and tried to reactivate the Omani
00:14:27.720 mediation channel and so on. But the Iranians have said, no, we don't want to have any talks.
00:14:35.640 And the man actually in charge of Iran, Ali Larijani, came out and said, we're not interested in
00:14:42.680 negotiations. We're not interested in talks. We are prepared for a very long war. And we are going
00:14:49.560 to continue with that war indefinitely. And you can see the logic behind it. 0.60
00:14:57.160 Already, natural gas prices are spiking. I've seen 25 percent and I've seen 50 percent. In a piece I wrote
00:15:04.440 recently on my own blog, that I wrote today on my own blog, I said 50 percent, but I could be wrong about
00:15:10.200 that. And if you haven't subscribed, please do subscribe even to the free part if you don't want to
00:15:15.480 pay that much money. But the Iranian logic is we are going to cause a global economic crisis 1.00
00:15:26.680 and we are going to use that crisis to force the Americans to back down. And given the fact that in
00:15:33.960 the previous two rounds of negotiation, first in June in 2025 and just now where the negotiations were
00:15:42.360 ongoing up until, you know, a day before the war started, they have no interest in negotiating. What they
00:15:50.280 want is to continue the war long enough for the Americans to back down and end the war without any 0.97
00:15:58.440 preconditions. That's what the Iranians are after. Which makes sense because why would you trust American 1.00
00:16:06.120 negotiators? The position of the al-Mani foreign minister, who was the lead mediator on the nuclear
00:16:12.280 issue, was that they were very close to an agreement with the Iranians having agreed to dilute their
00:16:19.800 enriched uranium stockpile. So they have uranium enriched to 60 percent, which isn't enough for a nuclear
00:16:26.600 weapon, which is pretty close to what's needed. Because the way that enrichment works, enriching from
00:16:34.120 zero to five percent is harder than enriching from five percent to 60 percent. Because you have more of
00:16:41.560 the heavy isotopes and then you can sort of spin the centrifuges and allow the different isotopes to
00:16:48.280 separate and that gets you to where you need to get faster. So the Iranians were willing to essentially 0.99
00:16:55.160 dilute all of that stockpile, maintain a very minimal symbolic enrichment capacity at three percent,
00:17:04.680 and they were ready to make a deal. And that's when the Americans decided to strike.
00:17:12.120 And indeed, it seems that the Americans decided to attack precisely because a deal was close.
00:17:17.880 Because the issue for the Israelis, who are the main instigator behind this war, 0.98
00:17:25.320 is not the Iranian nuclear program anymore. Because that can be monitored by the International
00:17:32.360 Atomic Energy Agency. Limits can be imposed. That can be resolved. The issue is the ballistic missile
00:17:39.720 program. And the ballistic missile program is proving its effectiveness right now in this war
00:17:46.280 because if you look at the images that are coming out of Israel and at the images that aren't coming
00:17:52.360 out, and I'll explain that in a second, you'll see that the Israelis have a massive problem. 0.96
00:17:57.560 Already there are reports that the Iranians have taken out the main desalination facility in Israel,
00:18:05.000 which accounts for 20 percent of Israel's water. Now, if these reports are true, that's a massive blow.
00:18:13.400 And CENTCOM put out a tweet saying that the Iranians have attacked a bunch of civilian targets,
00:18:18.680 including the Haifa refinery. Haifa in Israel doesn't just have a refinery. It has also a massive chemicals
00:18:28.360 complex, which basically acts as something of a chemical weapon within Israel. In the past,
00:18:37.320 the Israelis moved some of these assets away from Haifa, but that's not very easy. I think the refinery
00:18:45.720 sits here. You can see this huge complex that is energy storage here and things of that nature.
00:18:57.000 And you could see that if you blow up that complex, the kind of fumes that you get
00:19:02.200 ends up acting as a massive chemical weapon. And the Iranians are pounding central Israel pretty hard, 0.98
00:19:09.880 with the Israelis essentially imposing enormous restrictions on reporting to make sure that
00:19:16.440 nobody can hear about the actual extent of the damage they're taking. And that's part of the Iranian 1.00
00:19:24.120 strategy. They understand that the Israelis are the main instigator of this war. And so what they're 0.76
00:19:30.440 doing is attacking as much in Israel as they can in order to deplete the interceptors and then fire 0.80
00:19:40.120 more advanced missiles like the Khurram Shahr and like newer versions of missiles that they have
00:19:47.000 with the aim of properly crippling Israeli infrastructure. Knowing that if enough infrastructure 0.62
00:19:54.600 is destroyed, the domestic crisis in Israel will force the Israelis to back down and end the war.
00:20:02.440 So the Iranians in this are acting in a way that suggests that they're not interested in the quick 1.00
00:20:06.680 end of the war. And that a prolonged war, albeit one that causes insane amounts of damage within Iran,
00:20:13.800 is better for Iran than a short war, because what we've seen after short wars is that the Americans 0.93
00:20:23.960 will go back and try to bomb the Iranians again and again. And if there is one thing that they can't 1.00
00:20:29.080 survive is regular attacks on them that make them look weak and delegitimize the regime. Whereas a very
00:20:38.200 long but enormously expensive war, like the Iraq war, which lasted eight years, suits the Iranians better. 0.98
00:20:47.240 And they have an open supply line through the Russians and the Chinese. Whereas during the Iraq war,
00:20:52.120 the Iranians got so desperate that they had to buy weapons literally from the Israelis to fight Iraq.
00:20:59.720 So the thinking of the two sides is completely different.
00:21:02.120 And it is very hard to see how there is going to be a reconciliation.
00:21:13.240 Because again, the Iranians have absolutely zero reason to trust American negotiators.
00:21:19.560 Every time they've negotiated under the Trump administration, what it has led to is another war.
00:21:25.960 And so they need to continue this indefinitely. And so you see that the punishment against energy
00:21:32.120 infrastructure that the Gulf is taking makes a lot of sense from the Iranian perspective.
00:21:38.520 They are willing to go so far as to burn so much of the region to make it worthless for the Americans to stay there.
00:21:47.480 And the mindset there is exactly the mindset of the Syrian regime under Assad, whose famous slogan was,
00:21:56.600 Assad or we burn the country. And the IRGC seems to be operating on the idea that
00:22:04.680 it's either us or we burn down the entire region. And it's not like the Gulf states can do much about 0.86
00:22:11.320 this because we've seen several things. Firstly, we've seen that the Iranians have pretty good intelligence.
00:22:18.360 They were able to identify Americans, including reportedly a CIA team,
00:22:24.520 in hotels in the region and to specifically target that.
00:22:27.960 They are hitting the symbolic high profile things in the Gulf. So they hit Palm Jumeirah.
00:22:35.400 They hit Burj Dubai. They hit these kinds of flashy assets that the Gulfies are absolutely obsessed with. 0.97
00:22:44.520 And the message there is, we can really cut you where it hurts and make you understand that you aren't
00:22:52.840 safe so long as you are in partnership with the Americans. Plus, so far they're only attacking energy targets.
00:23:00.680 If they were to hit power generation, if they were to hit desalination,
00:23:07.640 that would create a humanitarian crisis for pretty much everybody in the Gulf.
00:23:12.920 Because the Gulf relies on an insane amount of power just to keep
00:23:17.080 things cool enough for the cities that they have to be habitable. Temperatures in the Gulf go up to 50
00:23:24.840 degrees in the summer. And the Westerners, who are the backbone of the economy throughout the Gulf,
00:23:32.120 cannot function in these temperatures. So if they hit power generation, it's a disaster.
00:23:38.760 If they hit desalination plants, it's a total disaster. It's the middle of the bloody desert.
00:23:45.880 There is no water. They rely on the desalination plants to function.
00:23:51.480 So the Iranians seem actually to have escalation dominance, meaning that the 1.00
00:23:57.080 aerial assets that the Gulf states have are going to stay parked in their place,
00:24:03.240 because if they participate in this war, the economic losses that they will suffer from
00:24:09.320 are not going to be recoverable. Or at least that's the threat. And if the Gulf states decide to call
00:24:19.240 the Iranians bluff and actually conduct attacks against Iran in partnership with the Americans,
00:24:26.520 well, then the drones will go to even higher value targets rather than refineries.
00:24:31.160 In countries like Saudi Arabia, pretty much the entirety of the energy ecosystem relies on one
00:24:40.120 facility, a raqq, which the Houthi hit once in 2019, and they disabled oil production for a period of time.
00:24:48.680 But it was a small pinprick attack designed to be symbolic to show it was at the time intended to
00:24:59.240 humiliate Trump after he had fired John Bolton, and it was intended to humiliate the Saudis and force 0.79
00:25:04.600 them to reach an end to the war in Yemen.
00:25:06.360 So the Iranians know exactly the layout of these facilities, and they can knock out Abakik with 1.00
00:25:14.920 something that is much heavier. In the UAE, the comparable facility is Habashan, where pretty much
00:25:21.800 all of the oil that is pumped out of the fields is concentrated in one processing facility, and
00:25:28.600 it's treated, all kinds of chemical processes are involved in order to make it usable and easier to
00:25:34.760 refine. And then from there, it's pumped onto the coast and it's loaded onto ships.
00:25:41.640 The ports and the storage facilities in those ports, as well as these kinds of massive processing
00:25:48.920 facilities in Saudi Arabia and in the UAE, can be fully disabled if the Iranians want to disable them.
00:25:59.000 And that's a big problem for the Gulf states. It puts them in a fundamentally untenable position.
00:26:04.760 And the idea is to force these states either to put pressure on the Americans to end the war
00:26:10.440 or to separate themselves from the Americans.
00:26:13.640 If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the Lotus Eaters,
00:26:17.000 head to our website where you can find more.
00:26:27.640 Thank you.
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