00:01:20.680But the Iranians also don't have a pathway to victory.1.00
00:01:24.860They can't defeat the United States. They can't destroy the American Navy.0.94
00:01:29.720This is now a bit of a waiting game, but as the two sides wait, they're in immense trouble.
00:01:36.440For the Iranians, their trade is largely cut off because of the American blockade.
00:01:41.420The American Navy has the power to impose a full blockade on Iran and stop any shipping into the country.
00:01:50.040And with a country the size of Iran, they need to import food, they need to import some fuel, they need to import all kinds of inputs that go into their industries, their economy gets paralyzed when they don't have trade.
00:02:04.500This is true of everybody. It's only a country like North Korea that is actually almost fully autarkic. Most countries rely on trade, and the best way to trade is still by sea.
00:02:19.440So for the Iranians, their economy is slowly falling apart.
00:02:24.180For the Americans, their economy is slowly falling apart,1.00
00:02:29.180but they are in a much better position than Iran0.90
00:02:31.700because nobody can impose a blockade on the United States.
00:02:35.780This is the situation as it currently stands.
00:02:39.420And this is beginning to cause some problems within Iran.
00:02:43.440The former president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, came out and said
00:02:47.760that if there are people in this country who think that we should fight global powers for
00:02:54.62020 years, they need to say that to the public and ask the public if they're willing to fight
00:03:01.120for 20 years. Essentially, Rouhani is calling for a deal. For those of you who don't know,
00:03:07.220Rouhani was the president when the agreement between Iran and the United States in 2015
00:03:13.940was finalized, and he had run for election against a much more hard-lined figure, Ibrahim Raisi,
00:03:21.180who later became president and then died in a mysterious helicopter crash.
00:03:26.320He was the president when that deal was agreed. And this isn't some random guy. Rouhani, before
00:03:34.400becoming president, was the representative of the late supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, on the Iranian
00:03:42.100European Supreme National Security Council. This is the decision-making body on all things related
00:03:49.600to foreign policy, military affairs, trade, etc. This is where the actual power in Iran lies.
00:03:56.740And as representative of Khamenei there, he would not have been in that position were he not a
00:04:02.760hardliner. So we have a cleric who was a former president and a hardliner trusted by Khamenei,
00:04:10.900essentially saying, look guys, we need to make a deal because we can't just sit there without any
00:04:17.380trade indefinitely. And the reason that he's saying that is obvious. The Iranian real is basically
00:04:29.780let me find the chart that I'm looking for here. If you look at what the Iranian currency has been
00:04:39.420doing since, say, July 2023, the currency is completely collapsing. And it is now at
00:04:49.360200,000 riyals to the dollar, 220,000 riyals to the dollar. It's losing almost 10% of its value
00:04:58.580in a matter of days. The Iranians are in very, very deep trouble. But they're not in so much
00:05:05.760trouble that they have to stop fighting. This hasn't arrived yet. What we've seen with these
00:05:11.940regimes, as we saw with Saddam in the 1990s, he was under a blockade. From 1990 till 2003,
00:05:20.380the regime didn't fall without military action. Assad was under enormous sanctions. From 2016
00:05:28.5002016 was when the Caesar Act kicked off, I think, to 2024. Enormous sanctions. The regime didn't fall without military action. So the Iranians can keep fighting. But there are voices in Iran that are saying, guys, is this really necessary? Are we not better off finding a deal?
00:05:47.420and obviously the hardliners in Iran were immensely critical of him, accusing him of
00:05:54.420wanting to surrender, accusing him of wanting to basically give up the fight. They're still
00:06:00.860trying to mobilize the public and mobilize the opinion of people to take a much more severe
00:06:08.060position, but you are beginning to see some cracks. And Danny Citronowitz, who's a former
00:06:16.760who's an Israeli analyst and actually pretty good, like his analysis tends to be very, very good.
00:06:24.820He points out that, look, this is a disaster for the Americans because they didn't have to go into
00:06:32.700this war. If Trump had stayed in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and just forced
00:06:38.560an extension of that deal that would have allowed more robust inspections on Iran and more restrictions
00:06:45.840on the nuclear program, none of this would have been necessary. None of this would have been
00:06:51.580necessary. But what the Americans did was that they weakened people like Rouhani who wanted an
00:06:57.260agreement. And now they are stuck in this war. And they don't really have a way out of it.
00:07:04.660It's not that the Americans are sitting idle. Over the last couple of weeks, since we last
00:07:10.460discussed the Middle East, the U.S. has announced a total economic war against the Iranians.0.77
00:07:17.820People are suspicious of this, and so am I, but the issue here is how much are the Chinese willing
00:07:26.660to help the Iranians, and can the Iranians get past the American blockade? And we will go over
00:07:32.680that in a few minutes. It's not the new sanctions that matter. It's the physical blockade of Iranian
00:07:41.320ports. That's what's actually hurting the Iranians the most. And they don't have a way out of that
00:07:47.020blockade. But what they are obviously going to do is to try to tighten their grip over the strait
00:07:53.860further. The Emiratis are saying that they are going to participate in this blockade against
00:08:01.040Iran, and they've announced that they're going to sever all of their ties to Iran and stop trading0.52
00:08:07.700with it, the Iranians can make them change their mind by just bombing them again. So the key0.95
00:08:14.860question is, do Gulf states get punished enough by the Iranians in order to break the U.S. blockade?1.00
00:08:22.340And with the Iranians more squeezed economically, they have no choice but to hit the Gulf states0.67
00:08:27.460more so this is again pointing towards escalation now the iranians are um confirming the idea that0.99
00:08:38.300they're getting screwed you're seeing people protesting over you know in case you were
00:08:44.300wondering about how the deliveroo economy is going in iran well obviously they don't have0.94
00:08:47.920the actual deliveroo but they have versions of it and what is happening there is that the iranians
00:08:53.820being forced to raise their fuel prices and low-level workers are beginning to protest against
00:09:00.220this and you are seeing the iranians being forced to raise the price of fuel in their country
00:09:08.620quite significantly having to double it essentially you're also seeing massive
00:09:13.660queues for fuel throughout iran because the iranians are short of a couple of hundred million
00:09:19.740barrels of gasoline, or a couple of million barrels of gasoline every day. And this shortage
00:09:29.240is hurting them. And the negotiations with Oman to try to find some way where they both charge0.85
00:09:36.120for fees to cross Hurmuz aren't going anywhere, the Omanis, having been threatened by Trump that
00:09:41.580he's going to bomb them, basically decided not to work with the Iranians. The only way that the0.94
00:09:48.180Iranians can change this is to keep on attacking the Gulf. The issue is that they aren't doing it.0.96
00:09:54.280And the reason that they aren't doing it is because they are deterred. They are afraid
00:09:58.180of the U.S. reaction. They are afraid of the Israeli reaction. As they get more and more
00:10:03.820desperate, however, despair forces people into very difficult choices. And the purpose of what
00:10:12.720is going on is to push this further, is to impose this kind of escalation further.
00:10:22.480Now, Reza'i, who is a pretty senior military leader in Iran, has come out and said that in
00:10:32.240response to the American blockade, the Iranians are going to shut down Hormuz completely.
00:10:37.520And what this points to is a massive escalation in the risks to shipping.
00:10:45.000Because right now, if we could get Google Maps on the screen, Samson,
00:10:49.220right now the Iranians are focusing their military efforts on shutting down just the Strait of Hormuz.
00:10:59.100That said, when you look at a map of the Iranian coast, it is pretty massive.
00:11:04.980and the Iranians have the option of attacking shipping from anywhere along their coast.0.54
00:11:14.480So what we've seen over the last few days in this round of escalation
00:11:18.120is basically the fighting focused just on the strait itself.
00:11:24.420And slowly the Iranian capability to control the strait