The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - March 18, 2026


PREVIEW： Realpolitk #38 ｜ Battleground Report

Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Hormuz Trump Ali Khamenei Firas Maudad Pete Hegseth Gerald Ford Bob McNally Lesser Tumb Abu Musa Patriot Kashyam Hexeth
PREVIEW： Realpolitik #32 ｜ Iran war？ The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1378

Episode Stats


Length

24 minutes

Words per minute

150.04

Word count

3,665

Sentence count

150

Harmful content

Hate speech

24

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I discuss how the Iranian war is going from an American perspective, and then we pivot a little bit to talk about the planned Israeli invasion of Lebanon. I talk about how the Iranians are using the situation in the region to their advantage, and why they should focus on other areas of the Middle East in order to maintain pressure on Iran.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host,
00:00:05.820 Firas Maudad, and today we're going to be talking a little bit more about the
00:00:09.680 Iran war, how things seem to be going from an American perspective, and then we're going to
00:00:16.300 pivot a little bit and talk about Lebanon and the planned Israeli invasion for that country.
00:00:23.700 Now, if we look at what's been happening in the war itself, the Americans have been bombing quite heavily the west and southwest of Iran, with the idea being that they want to destroy a significant amount of Iran's missile launch capabilities.
00:00:46.360 And we keep hearing that the number of launchers has been massively reduced, and the actual firing rate of the Iranians has reduced quite significantly, but there are two points that I want to make.
00:01:00.140 the first point is that the u.s is focusing on attacking this area in the um in the west of the
00:01:09.520 country and then moving inwards so that they can target the haran more effectively and target the
00:01:15.720 center of the country more effectively and that as a strategy makes sense but there's one thing to
00:01:20.800 consider which is that if you're the iranians um once some of your bases are damaged these are
00:01:28.840 in a lot of cases, underground bases and the tunnel entrances are being damaged and it takes
00:01:35.380 a bit of time to reopen them. So what you might consider doing is delaying reopening these tunnels
00:01:42.660 and delaying resuming the use of these bases because they've been exposed and focusing a
00:01:48.880 little bit on survivability of your ability to launch weapons so that as the Iranians continue 1.00
00:01:57.060 to degrade the radars and the air defenses of the United States and Israel, they would then be in a 0.64
00:02:03.960 position to deliver a large strike near the end of the war. And this isn't unusual. This is exactly
00:02:11.520 how Hezbollah fought in 2006. In 2006, Hezbollah made a point of making sure that the last day of
00:02:19.120 the war, right before the ceasefire took effect, was the day in which they launched the largest 0.99
00:02:26.380 number of missiles and delivered therefore the biggest blow and they were able to use that to
00:02:32.320 spin a victory narrative so if you're iran and you're fighting kind of as an insurgency which
00:02:37.720 is what the iranians are doing then that makes sense and the u.s strategy of detecting the
00:02:42.740 entrances of these tunnels trying to damage them and destroy them you reply you respond to that by
00:02:48.180 focusing on survival and you fire from inland more and more and you force the americans to go more in
00:02:55.600 depth, and therefore that means that they can conduct fewer airstrikes. And then when the war
00:03:02.000 is waning, you try to deliver bigger blows in order to say that you're winning. That's kind of
00:03:08.200 how the Iranians fight. The second point to make is that the Iranians need to fire less now. They've 1.00
00:03:15.940 demonstrated that they can cause massive damage to American military bases. We are seeing images
00:03:21.880 of that damage all over social media.
00:03:24.340 You see satellite imagery of U.S. bases in Kuwait
00:03:27.660 and in Qatar and in Bahrain and in the UAE,
00:03:30.840 and they've all been quite significantly degraded.
00:03:35.460 That means now the idea is to maintain the pressure,
00:03:39.880 and the process of maintaining pressure
00:03:41.800 requires less use of ordnance,
00:03:45.100 especially when you know that you don't have air superiority.
00:03:48.340 In fact, Iranian airspace is fully exposed,
00:03:51.200 or largely exposed and so you use that um in order to just keep up the pressure on the gulf states
00:04:01.280 and on energy markets so that you can then say that you're achieving your political objective
00:04:09.200 which is to show the united states that every time they attack iran the entire global energy
00:04:15.040 market gets disrupted, the Middle East in its entirety gets attacked, and therefore you use 1.00
00:04:21.280 that to create deterrence. So this is sort of what's happening with a missile fire. Plus the
00:04:27.120 Iranians are still causing damage to central Tel Aviv. They are still able to fire missiles, 1.00
00:04:32.400 and these missiles are not always being intercepted. We don't really trust the
00:04:36.960 interception figures to begin with. As we saw with the Ukraine war, both the Russians and
00:04:43.440 and the Ukrainians were lying about their 0.84
00:04:45.220 interception rates, so I would
00:04:47.320 assume that there is some falsification
00:04:49.620 of the data, some exaggeration
00:04:51.320 of the success rate of interceptors,
00:04:53.380 meaning that we are still very much
00:04:55.300 in a fog of war.
00:04:57.200 But what we do know for sure
00:04:58.880 from the imagery that we're seeing
00:05:00.700 is that American bases have taken
00:05:03.400 significant damage. This is true.
00:05:05.900 A lot of energy assets
00:05:07.340 throughout the Gulf have taken significant damage.
00:05:09.800 This is not contestable.
00:05:10.760 Iran itself has taken massive damage, enormous damage. The problem has been, from the American 1.00
00:05:18.100 perspective, is that this has not had the desired effect. One of the objectives of the war was to
00:05:25.680 create the conditions through which Iranian protesters would simply rise up and overthrow 0.74
00:05:32.000 the regime, and then you'd have a government that is friendly to Israel and the United States.
00:05:38.240 the exact opposite has happened there has been a rallying around the flag every time a building
00:05:45.240 is destroyed after they retrieve the bodies and the injured and so on they plant an iranian flag
00:05:51.380 on top of it and anybody who is seen as protesting the regime is seen now as for supporting a foreign
00:06:00.860 assault on iran and iran is not only a shia country that values martyrdom quite highly
00:06:07.780 It is also an incredibly nationalistic country that really doesn't like the idea of foreign interference, be it from the Russians or from the Americans or from anybody else for that matter.
00:06:21.660 Indeed, one of the big failings of Iranian air defense comes from this nationalism 0.99
00:06:27.200 because the Iranians refused to wholly depend on either China or Russia for their air defense,
00:06:35.320 meaning that they had to develop their own domestic alternatives, which arguably weren't as good.
00:06:41.420 And the reason for that was because they didn't want to become too dependent.
00:06:47.280 Now, how does this in the end play out?
00:06:49.820 well, if the regime survives, the first thing that they're going to have to do after a ceasefire
00:06:54.840 is pretty much give the Chinese whatever assets they want within Iran
00:06:59.860 and use that to acquire defense systems from the Chinese and from the Russians.
00:07:07.080 If you remember in, I believe, 2017 or 2018,
00:07:11.800 the Russians managed to get briefly basing rights within Iran,
00:07:15.980 and they used these basing rights so that they could fly from Iranian airspace all the way to
00:07:24.500 Yemen and they had some of their long-range strategic bombers the I think it was the bear 1.00
00:07:30.680 fly from bases in Iran all the way to the coasts of Yemen and the Russians were sort of sending a
00:07:39.380 message by doing that that look we can dominate the airspace over the Gulf if we partner with
00:07:45.320 Iran. This itself triggered a backlash from the Iranian parliament, because the Iranian 1.00
00:07:51.640 constitution doesn't allow for any foreign bases on their territory. But now the Iranians are going 1.00
00:07:57.980 to have no choice. They're going to have to cede a huge amount of ground to the Chinese and to the 1.00
00:08:04.540 Russians at the expense of their sovereignty to immunize themselves against the next attack. 0.78
00:08:09.760 And remember, with Khamenei dead, there is no religious reason for them not to develop a nuclear weapon anymore.
00:08:18.480 It was the fatwa of the former supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, that prevented them from developing a nuclear weapon.
00:08:25.260 Now, with a new supreme leader, they could decide that the threat is sufficiently existential for them to build one.
00:08:33.480 So we'll see how that goes.
00:08:35.980 But let's see how the Americans feel about the war and what seems to be going on.
00:08:43.560 Well, for one thing, now refueling flights that are being used to target Iran are avoiding Iraqi airspace.
00:08:52.020 Because a couple of days ago, there was an accident, supposedly, between two American tankers and one of them was lost.
00:09:00.560 And six crew members were killed, unfortunately.
00:09:02.600 And I say unfortunately about all people who are killed during war, both civilian and combatant, war is a terrible thing.
00:09:10.940 You shouldn't rejoice in the death of people in war even.
00:09:17.300 But the fact that they're having to use this longer route and avoid Iraqi airspace might suggest something slightly different,
00:09:24.420 which is that this tanker was shot down by air defense.
00:09:27.980 We're also seeing that the American aircraft carriers are sort of moving away from Iran.
00:09:37.560 So the Gerald Ford, which is supposed to go through the Red Sea and then pass through Bab al-Mandeb and exit and join the area of operations here,
00:09:47.780 actually has opted to stay in the vicinity of Jeddah, here next to Saudi Arabia,
00:09:52.720 so that they would have these mountains in the west of Saudi Arabia
00:09:57.460 kind of protect them from the possibility of attack by the Iranians.
00:10:02.460 And the other aircraft carrier is supposed to be operating somewhat in this area,
00:10:07.040 south of Oman,
00:10:09.060 meaning that they are making sure that there aren't just open seas
00:10:13.500 between them and the Iranian coast.
00:10:16.740 And this suggests that there is some anti-ship capability
00:10:19.420 that the Americans are concerned about.
00:10:21.440 it also suggests that the Americans really don't want to cross through Bab el-Mandab.
00:10:26.920 They don't want to expose themselves to major attacks from the Houthi
00:10:30.440 because of what might be getting prepared there.
00:10:34.400 So these are two indications that the war isn't really going particularly great
00:10:40.300 from an American perspective,
00:10:42.120 but the indications from the political arena are even stronger.
00:10:46.520 Here we have Bob McNally, who's a former White House energy advisor, saying that there isn't really a solution to what is happening in the Strait of Hormuz, that they don't have any options that would allow the United States to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and resume the flow of energy.
00:11:06.940 And what we've seen the Iranians do is attack the energy facilities in the UAE, in Fujairah, here, which are intended, essentially, to bypass Hormuz.
00:11:22.060 So what the Iranians do, they blew up all the fuel tanks and all the oil storage tanks in the port of Fujairah, created a massive fire, meaning that the oil that gets pumped from Abu Dhabi, around about this area where Habshan is located, that oil gets sent by pipeline all the way, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, up there, and goes through here. 0.97
00:11:50.200 and that export terminal or that export capability has been disabled.
00:11:56.340 And the Americans are now saying, look, we don't actually have a policy solution for this.
00:12:00.120 We don't have a way to open it.
00:12:02.960 Then you kind of see this unhinged press conference from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
00:12:10.120 And I want us to listen to this together for a couple of minutes
00:12:13.500 to get an impression of how things are really going.
00:12:20.200 And because you, and I mean specifically you, the press, specifically you, the press corps, because you cheer against Trump so hard, it's like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump, because you want him not to be successful so bad, you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes.
00:12:42.060 You have to hope maybe they weren't effective. Maybe the way the Trump administration's
00:12:47.140 representative isn't true. So let's take half-truths, spun information, leaked information,
00:12:54.340 and then spin it, spin it in every way we can to try to cause doubt and manipulate the mind,
00:13:02.560 the public mind over whether or not our brave pilots were successful. How many stories have
00:13:08.620 been written about how hard it is to, I don't know, fly a plane for 36 hours. Has MSNBC done
00:13:15.320 that story? Has Fox? Have we done the story how hard that is? Have we done it two or three times
00:13:20.800 so that American people understand how about how difficult it is to shoot a drone from an F-15 or
00:13:25.260 F-16 or F-22 or F-35? Or what it's like to man a Patriot battery? Or how hard it is to refuel
00:13:31.260 midair? Giving the American people an understanding of how complex and sophisticated this mission
00:13:36.340 really was there are so many aspects of what our brave men and women did that by because of the
00:13:42.940 hatred of this press corps are undermined because your people are trying to leak and spin that it
00:13:50.120 wasn't successful it's irresponsible look i think that um when you see senior officials react in
00:13:58.020 this way what tells you is that they are under massive pressure what it tells you is that they
00:14:03.700 are under massive pressure and that their narrative simply isn't convincing anyone and as a
00:14:12.320 result they lash out in this rather extreme way. But underneath that there's also something
00:14:18.100 important. Hexeth is emphasizing the complexity of American operations. Now there is a problem
00:14:24.220 here. Highly technical, highly complex operations, things always go wrong in them at some point,
00:14:31.320 which is natural. It's not an accusation. But the issue has been that the strategy of the so-called
00:14:38.460 resistance axis, which is Iran and its allies, has always been to counter very complex operations
00:14:45.260 with very simple solutions. So for example, the Americans are saying that they have fully
00:14:51.240 neutralized Iranian command and control. Okay, that's how they define it in military terms.
00:14:57.520 But the reality is that we're seeing Hezbollah and Iran conduct coordinated strikes against Israel.
00:15:04.740 Meaning that there is still a chain of command that is operating.
00:15:09.100 Meaning that there is still communication that is operating.
00:15:12.480 Meaning that they're still passing intelligence to each other on target selection.
00:15:18.140 And speaking to somebody who was informed about this stuff,
00:15:22.700 he was telling me that they could be doing this over something as simple as World of Warcraft
00:15:26.780 or signal or telegram or whatever or any kind of simple communications where there is massive
00:15:34.940 volume and it's difficult to detect the signal from the noise. So they engage in these highly
00:15:42.500 complex operations, but the enemy on the other side just sticks to simple solutions that it
00:15:48.200 knows well, such as maintaining missile fire that is enough to cause massive economic disruption
00:15:54.380 that creates political pressure and then that political pressure at some point forces the war
00:16:01.500 to an end and then the Iranians declare victory regardless of how much damage they've taken.
00:16:08.200 So we've seen this playbook in the past and it seems that they've fallen into this playbook
00:16:12.380 and they don't have a way out of it. Other reactions that we're seeing from Trump,
00:16:18.360 Here he is reacting to a reporter asking him, why is the United States sending the Marines to the Middle East to sort of potentially engage in a ground operation?
00:16:31.760 Listen to that.
00:16:33.420 Sorry, the audio on this is terrible, so I won't actually play it.
00:16:37.060 But his response to this question, which is a simple question, I don't talk to people like you about that.
00:16:42.520 Why would I tell you if I'm sending or I'm not sending?
00:16:45.440 Who would answer a question like that?
00:16:48.360 well, if you're the commander-in-chief, you've got to be able to spin a narrative, convincing or
00:16:54.680 unconvincing, about why you are sending ground troops, and what do you intend to do with them,
00:17:00.880 and why will these men be risking their lives, dying on the shores of Iran. And the fact that
00:17:09.260 he can't do that, and that he's in sort of meltdown mode, is really a problem. Now, when it comes to
00:17:16.120 this talk of a ground operation, there's been a lot of rumors about the United States sending
00:17:22.500 their forces to capture this island here, Khadrg Island, which sits off the coast of Iran.
00:17:30.640 To understand the importance of this, the Iranian oil fields are largely in this area,
00:17:37.680 on the border with Iraq, in an area referred to as Ahvaz or Khuzestan or whatever you want to call
00:17:44.340 it. This used to be a largely Arab area, but it's largely been Persianized. And that's where most of
00:17:51.100 the oil is. The gas comes offshore from an area facing Qatar, but the oil gets pumped by pipeline
00:18:00.220 mostly into this island. There are alternative routes, but this is the most important one.
00:18:05.460 And then the ships load it and it gets exported. And there's talk that the United States will use
00:18:12.400 the Marines to try to seize this island. I don't buy that for a second. I have to say that I don't
00:18:18.260 buy that for a second. If you look at the distances here and how defense would work, the Iranians would 1.00
00:18:24.940 sort of surround this area with anti-ship missiles and with drone bases. And these wouldn't be
00:18:33.460 activated now. They would be activated later when there are valuable targets, obviously. And this is
00:18:40.620 right across the coast from Mushahr, where the Iranians have their nuclear energy reactor,
00:18:47.000 the one facility that produces electricity from nuclear energy, built in collaboration
00:18:52.380 with the Russians.
00:18:53.440 Originally, I think it was with the Germans in the days of the Shah, and the Russians
00:18:57.320 delayed it for a long time, but now it's in collaboration with the Russians, and this
00:19:02.900 is obviously a heavily fortified, heavily defended point.
00:19:05.840 and sending 2,500 marines or 5,000 marines
00:19:11.340 to try to capture that area
00:19:13.480 doesn't really pass the SIF test
00:19:16.080 it doesn't really make sense
00:19:17.700 so they're sending ground forces into the region
00:19:21.580 because toppling the regime from the air
00:19:24.960 obviously was never going to work
00:19:26.860 like I said in a previous episode
00:19:28.580 in Serbia it took 78 days
00:19:32.180 for the population of Serbia
00:19:33.680 which was 6 million people
00:19:35.180 to surrender. Iran has 92, 93 million people and is 20 times the size. So it's not going to work. 0.99
00:19:45.560 But that means that sending ground forces is going to be even less effective.
00:19:52.140 What could be the case is that the United States is planning on trying to seize a bunch of these
00:19:58.340 islands here. So this is actually the island of Hurmuz, after which the strait is named.
00:20:04.420 And this is Kashyam. And then you have a bunch of islands here, and then you have Abu Musa,
00:20:10.300 Tumb al-Kubra, and Tumb al-Sughra, Greater Tumb and Lesser Tumb. And these islands are obviously
00:20:17.500 turned into military bases by the IRGC because they can help police the Gulf. And you could use
00:20:23.820 these islands to target ships as they gather to be escorted by convoys through the Strait of Hormuz.
00:20:32.260 Once they're in the strait, they can be targeted from three sides,
00:20:36.460 and they can be attacked from these islands,
00:20:38.580 and you use that to diversify, shall we say, your firing positions
00:20:44.920 in order to confuse the defense systems,
00:20:47.920 and in order to use this particularly narrow region
00:20:51.280 to maximize the impact of your attacks.
00:20:54.800 But you could use the islands themselves quite similarly.
00:20:58.380 And if you're going to send ground forces,
00:21:00.720 when it makes a lot more sense
00:21:02.960 to try to see some of these islands.
00:21:05.360 But again, this is quite difficult
00:21:07.360 because these islands are going to be fortified
00:21:11.220 because the Iranians know
00:21:12.680 that this might be part of your plan.
00:21:16.480 And sending 2,500 Marines, 0.72
00:21:18.840 will it be enough for an operation of this size?
00:21:22.320 I doubt it.
00:21:24.040 But it seems that this is the only way that they have
00:21:26.740 to try to reopen the strait.
00:21:28.440 and you can see from Trump's response
00:21:32.200 obviously he can't reveal that
00:21:35.140 he can't say that publicly
00:21:36.300 but from the way that he's responding
00:21:39.460 it would have been a lot more reasonable to say
00:21:41.160 we're going to surprise the Iranians 1.00
00:21:43.360 they're going to have no idea what hit them
00:21:45.920 we're going to force them to surrender
00:21:47.640 something like that
00:21:48.680 instead he just goes off on a rant
00:21:51.160 and attacks the media
00:21:52.300 and you see that the Iranians 0.68
00:21:57.480 seem to have mined the strait already, meaning that sending in the marines is going to have to
00:22:04.120 come in conjunction with other things like demining, and meaning that it is going to be
00:22:10.540 quite difficult for this to be a success. And we know that it's going to be difficult because
00:22:16.840 the Americans are already asking a bunch of European countries to send their own forces
00:22:23.620 to help open Hormuz, and obviously the Europeans have said no
00:22:29.780 because they struggled massively to help with opening Bab el-Mandeb
00:22:35.440 through the Aspiris Misran, I believe it was called.
00:22:38.720 They don't have the resources to go and try to open this area.
00:22:44.820 But then also, you have to remember that given the size of the U.S. Navy and its power,
00:22:50.360 However, if they can't actually force open Hormuz by themselves, having others participate isn't going to change things.
00:22:59.380 It really isn't going to change very much.
00:23:03.680 And you can see that the American position is quite desperate because they're asking China to come and help open the Strait of Hormuz.
00:23:12.200 And Trump says that China gets 90% of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz.
00:23:16.520 In reality, it's something like 50%.
00:23:18.600 but imagine asking China to help you resolve a war that you started by choice.
00:23:29.380 How desperate does that look?
00:23:32.480 And the fact that Trump is making that request,
00:23:35.600 from the Chinese perspective, it just makes him look unhinged 1.00
00:23:39.160 and completely out of touch with reality.
00:23:42.200 Apparently the Japanese have said no, the South Koreans have said no,
00:23:46.220 And understandably, because if a big chunk of the Japanese or the South Korean Navy gets
00:23:51.420 sent into Hormuz and then they take losses, what does that do? That leaves them more exposed to
00:23:58.700 China moving on Taiwan. That's all that it does. And so just making that request is a sign of 0.82
00:24:07.280 desperation and is a sign of complete detachment from reality. And you see how many problems the
00:24:14.560 Americans are facing because you have Basant admitting that the Americans are allowing 1.00
00:24:21.540 Iranian ships to transit Hormuz instead of seizing them.