TRIGGERnometry - Iran Shoots Down US Helicopter - Iran War Update with Richard Miniter and Thomas Small

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00:00:30.400 Hello, everybody, and welcome to a very special edition of Trigonometry.

00:00:34.820 We are here live with Francis, myself, obviously, but much more importantly,

00:00:39.540 two of our favorite expert guests when it comes to the Middle East,

00:00:43.180 the war in Iran, Israel, Lebanon.

00:00:45.280 We'll talk about all of that.

00:00:46.480 Richard Minniter, investigative journalist based in D.C.,

00:00:49.380 author of numerous bestsellers, and, of course,

00:00:53.360 some of our episodes with him, one of our episodes,

00:00:55.560 over a million views uh the conversation we had with him and amon dean uh about this conflict

00:01:01.920 a couple of months back again a million views thomas small needs very little introduction

00:01:06.900 uh co-host of the conflicted podcast with amon dean uh again has been on the show numerous times

00:01:13.540 all of them have absolutely crushed because he really does know what he's talking about

00:01:17.160 uh welcome to you both gentlemen thank you very much nice to be here great to be here it's great

00:01:23.880 to have you. We wanted to do the thing that Francis and I always like to do, which is go big

00:01:28.060 picture and talk about where we are, what's the situation, why isn't there peace yet, etc. But

00:01:33.500 while we were getting ready to go on air, we just received news that a US Apache helicopter had been

00:01:39.180 shot down, confirmed by President Trump. The pilots have been rescued. Richard, what can you tell us

00:01:45.080 about that and perhaps the impact it's going to have on this conflict before we get into the big

00:01:49.220 picture. So the shoot done happened last night. The rescue occurred late last night, Washington

00:01:56.060 time. And the president and his people are scrambling to figure out what it means. So

00:02:03.060 there are different factions trying to understand this event. It was apparently a Shahid drone.

00:02:08.780 The question is, was it intentional or not intentional? This is a kind of very Washington 0.80

00:02:15.040 in question. If it's intentional, it means that this institution called the government of Iran

00:02:21.560 is signaling that it's no longer interested in peace and in fact wants to go back to war

00:02:26.020 with the United States. But that's the question one faction is asking. Another faction is asking

00:02:33.340 this question. Is the Iranian government a unified entity? In other words, are there

00:02:41.780 Iranian Revolutionary Guards units that were given orders before the late Ayatollah Khomeini

00:02:49.160 was killed, that in the event of his departure from this earth, that he would, that they are

00:02:58.100 to do the following. And are they then sort of blindly following the commands of a dead leader?

00:03:03.460 and therefore, because it's a fractured government, they are not able to negotiate

00:03:13.080 because some units are acting independently or independently of the current leadership.

00:03:20.640 There's a third faction, which is, hey, there's an election coming up in November

00:03:26.320 and Republican voters who are desperately needed

00:03:30.720 for the Trump people to avoid a two-year cycle

00:03:34.760 of investigations, impeachments, and accusations

00:03:37.300 are not likely to turn up if gas prices are high.

00:03:42.740 And so let's wrap up this war however we do it,

00:03:45.800 says the third faction,

00:03:47.660 in order to have some hope

00:03:50.560 of salvaging the midterm elections.

00:03:53.360 So these are three different questions

00:03:55.700 about three different things,

00:03:58.600 none of which is really about the reality in Iran today.

00:04:03.660 And it may well be what matters most in making peace.

00:04:09.560 And I want to remind you of an Iranian proverb now.

00:04:12.620 The bowl is hotter than the soup.

00:04:16.080 In other words, the interest of Iran in peace,

00:04:20.620 the soup isn't very high.

00:04:22.580 And the Trump is trying to warm the bowl, right?

00:04:24.840 but it doesn't warm the soup. 0.98

00:04:28.860 And it might be because the people in charge in Iran

00:04:32.660 cannot figure out how they make peace

00:04:35.740 and stay in power at the same time.

00:04:38.160 They understand how they stay in power

00:04:40.040 if they had working atomic weapons 0.91

00:04:41.500 because it's the North Korean strategy.

00:04:43.700 They've looked at Ukraine, they've looked at Libya

00:04:46.300 and they've looked at North Korea and Pakistan

00:04:48.980 and they've said, well, hmm,

00:04:50.680 turned out better for the Pakistanis and the North Koreans

00:04:52.940 than for the Libyans and the Ukrainians. 0.98

00:04:55.340 We think we'll choose atomic weapons, you know, 0.96

00:04:57.500 from door number three, please.

00:04:59.460 That option has been denied to them

00:05:01.620 through the U.S. and Israeli efforts

00:05:03.740 and many other reasons.

00:05:06.720 And, I mean, one is the Russian scientists

00:05:08.680 who are helping them were pointedly going slow

00:05:11.240 because while it serves Putin's interest

00:05:14.800 for Iran to be building a nuclear weapon,

00:05:17.020 it does not serve Putin's interest

00:05:18.760 for them to have a nuclear weapon.

00:05:21.160 So there are you have to realize that Iran is at the center of the world stage.

00:05:26.960 China has an interest. Russia has an interest. It's not just the U.S. versus Iran.

00:05:32.120 But that's a one side. And I've probably thrown enough things on the table. 0.56

00:05:35.700 But if they can figure out how they can stay in power and have peace, they will take peace.

00:05:42.800 And it seems and this is incredible to me, but it seems that everyone I'm talking to in the administration

00:05:47.880 has sort of given up on the idea of regime change. The people of Iran have not.

00:05:54.580 The question Washington is answering, which is an incredibly stupid question, 0.98

00:05:59.040 is, well, why haven't the Iranian people risen up and demanded democracy? And two reasons. One, 0.99

00:06:07.500 democracy may not be the desired outcome of the majority of people. They may want a different

00:06:11.800 form of government uh secondly they did try that and 40 000 of them were killed in two days

00:06:19.640 the the the regime is willing to do its version of tiananmen square every single day until the

00:06:27.540 people go home and that's why they haven't risen up but instead around washington it's inside the

00:06:33.840 administration even it's presented as a genuine head scratcher like why haven't these people risen

00:06:37.960 up? Haven't things gotten bad enough for them? And it's just not possible.

00:06:44.500 Well, I mean, obviously, you raise so many different issues there, Richard. One of the

00:06:50.080 most immediate ones is you say that the regime will go for peace if it means they can stay in

00:06:57.760 power. But then you also say that the regime has clearly looked at North Korea and Pakistan and

00:07:04.620 worked out that having nuclear weapons is better than not. And it's becoming clear that if the

00:07:11.140 Trump administration has given up on regime change, because they clearly can't achieve it

00:07:15.700 effectively, then does that mean that Iran effectively has all the cards? Because President 0.82

00:07:23.260 Trump can't do this indefinitely for the political reasons you articulated, which is the looming

00:07:28.000 midterms. I mean, when we interviewed Ted Cruz on our last America trip, he was very clear this

00:07:32.960 would be a terrible thing. And I think his words were, we will have failed if this war is still

00:07:37.540 going on around the midterms. I don't know that that's not what's going to happen here.

00:07:44.840 Everyone in the Senate that I've talked to, which is, you know, not all of them, but a number of

00:07:49.260 them thinks the same thing. The midterms will be a disaster for the Republican Party if gas prices

00:07:57.000 are still high and the war is continuing. And frankly, it's also a matter of time. I mean,

00:08:02.800 they managed to save the helicopter crew that was shot down Sunday night, or Monday night. 0.82

00:08:10.260 But there will come a time when Iran successfully kills, or even worse, captures American servicemen.

00:08:19.120 And that will be an immense political crisis.

00:08:25.720 So Trump needs to find a way.

00:08:28.000 I mean, I don't know anyone who is an impatient with Trump to find a way to end this quickly and in something that resembles victory.

00:08:38.780 There are cynics who think, well, Trump will just take a deal, any deal just to get out of it.

00:08:43.640 That is a misreading of the president that I don't think is the reality.

00:08:49.160 Richard, may I jump in very briefly just to test what you're saying?

00:08:52.840 If if the Iranians seem to have all the leverage and President Trump needs to do a deal or is under pressure to do one, isn't it inevitable that the deal he will do will be a bad deal?

00:09:07.820 That's exactly what the critics of the president say, what you just said.

00:09:11.360 Right. I I think that they are wrong because the usual groups are exerting their usual pressure.

00:09:18.140 But does Trump feel pressure? It doesn't appear that he does.

00:09:22.840 a man under pressure would do things differently than he's doing at the moment

00:09:27.420 a man under pressure would either escalate in the hopes that that might somehow work

00:09:31.560 or urgently take any deal we don't see either one of those things happening

00:09:36.600 what amazes me about observers of president trump is they never go and read his three books

00:09:41.900 especially the art of the deal if he was under pressure he would be acting in the ways that he

00:09:48.760 would outline how to get out of bad deals in the art of the deal instead he still thinks that he

00:09:54.820 has all of the important cards and he does there are things that his critics don't seem to be able

00:10:00.840 to imagine which are obvious next steps here's two of them one start sinking the shadow fleet

00:10:06.820 instead of interdicting them and chasing them around the world just torpedo them and let them

00:10:10.840 sink in the middle of long cold dark oceans um iran will immediately notice that because that

00:10:17.360 If they can't turn crude into cash, they can't keep paying off their internal constituencies and stay in power.

00:10:25.680 The second thing he could do is to tell Qatar, you will no longer pay the $500 million rent for the South Par's gas field to Iran.

00:10:36.680 Instead, you will pay it into a fund the U.S. will control and hold in escrow for the rebuilding of Iran after this unpleasantness.

00:10:42.840 If either one of those things or both of those things happen, which, you know, there are other things Trump could do that are not kinetic military activity to increase the pressure on Iran.

00:10:55.180 Also, I see that the public diplomacy of the State Department is finally moving forward, more Farsi language messaging, more messaging in Kurdish and Baha'i, and more attempt to now talk to the Arabs in Awaz.

00:11:09.640 that's the little bit of western Iran that borders the southwest of Iraq so

00:11:16.000 they're becoming a little more sophisticated in trying to connect with

00:11:19.600 Iranian opinion there are various points of leverage the Trump can escalate from

00:11:24.340 here he thinks he has until the end of the summer or certainly he's acting like

00:11:28.360 he has to the end of the summer I'm not a mind reader and he might right I'm

00:11:33.460 gonna level with you I'm not a gamer even though I look like one I'm not gonna

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00:12:53.920 and the app is mobile only so click the link from your phone not your laptop

00:13:01.440 And, Thomas, the one thing that we always keep coming back to in this conflict is the Strait of Hormuz.

00:13:09.160 Is there any way that the Americans can actually gain control of this strait, or will it always be Iran's to close, if and when they want it to?

00:13:19.220 Oh, gosh, I wish I knew the answer to that question, Francis.

00:13:23.060 I mean, I'm not a military expert, particularly. 0.86

00:13:26.180 At the beginning of the war, I thought it would be more or less achievable to win the Arabian Gulf, the Persian Gulf, for America's side in this conflict to neutralize the possibility that the Iranian regime would close the strait as it did. 0.99

00:13:44.440 I would have thought that's a very straightforwardly obvious thing to do. 0.99

00:13:49.080 It did seem that that was on the cards. We saw the three aircraft carrier groups moving into

00:13:54.440 the region. A lot of commando groups were moving in, American ones, including it seems based on

00:14:03.000 things that have come out recently to Israel working together with the Israeli partners.

00:14:07.880 The whole idea was going to be to take those very strategically key islands in the Persian Gulf

00:14:14.440 and control it. That might have required some troops to land on the Iranian shore to project

00:14:23.280 that power further into the mainland. Obviously, it wouldn't have been easy. It's extremely

00:14:31.980 mountainous there. There are lots of valleys. The Iranians have prepared for a long time for

00:14:37.700 that eventuality. So there would have been some casualties, of course. But it strikes me as that 1.00

00:14:43.200 was absolutely an obvious thing that should have happened. The fact that it didn't happen,

00:14:48.720 that Iran was able to close the strait, it remains closed, really, is the thing that sort

00:14:54.280 of stymies a lot of people truly to make sense of it. Unless, as some people say, the military

00:15:02.740 apparatuses, the material was not in place, was not enough to take it sort of

00:15:13.180 with confidence. Some people suggest that when those two American servicemen were rescued from

00:15:20.400 Iran or early-ish on in the war, just before the ceasefire, that that spooked the president a

00:15:26.000 little bit. The idea that maybe Americans would have been captured by the regime, who would have

00:15:31.360 then been able to parade them in front of cameras, humiliating the Americans, humiliating the 0.89

00:15:36.660 president in a way eerily reminiscent of the sort of scenes that were seen after the Iranian

00:15:42.600 Revolution, which brought, you know, some people say brought down Carter's chances of re-election

00:15:47.700 and certainly sort of overshadowed his presidency in President Trump's mind, for sure, because even

00:15:55.300 in the 80s, President Trump was very open about how humiliating all of that was for the Americans.

00:16:00.660 So some people suggest that slightly spooked him. He realized just how bad it would be for him

00:16:06.700 politically if American servicemen were brought in harm's way and possibly taking control of the 0.64

00:16:12.180 Persian Gulf enough to ensure that the Iranian regime can't close the strait would definitely

00:16:17.460 have put too many American servicemen in harm's way. And that was a bridge too far for the 0.84

00:16:21.860 president. That's what I've heard. It's, you know, I don't really know. Right now, there does not seem

00:16:27.480 to be any appetite for anything like the sort of military campaign that would be required to win

00:16:33.840 back the strait. But we'll see this attack on the Apache helicopter has now, I think just like

00:16:41.300 within the last 90 minutes. President Trump has tweeted on Truth Social that the United States

00:16:47.140 must of necessity respond to this attack. What that will mean, I don't know. That may actually

00:16:53.320 be a sign of what the attack was about. If, in fact, the Iranian regime did attack that helicopter

00:16:58.680 with anything like intention, it may be because the Iranian regime is testing President Trump now

00:17:05.780 to see how he will react. There's been a lot of back and forth in the last week between Israel

00:17:11.160 in the regime, between Israel and Hezbollah. Trump, you know, on truth social, being quite

00:17:16.220 anti-Israeli, telling Benjamin Netanyahu to hold back. Benjamin Netanyahu, it seems, ignoring that,

00:17:22.420 instead attacking. But then perhaps behind the scenes, there's less truth to that than it seems.

00:17:27.280 This might be political theatrics. Maybe Trump and Netanyahu are conspiring together in a good

00:17:33.540 cop, bad cop kind of routine. Maybe the Iranian regime is trying to get a sense. Where is President 0.71

00:17:39.420 Trump really sort of standing. He makes a big sign about wanting a deal. He's been flattering

00:17:44.900 the Supreme Leader. Now, Mujtaba Khamenei calling him a genius, calling him a man of courage,

00:17:50.680 all of these things. Very strange language, given that two months ago, that's not the language he

00:17:55.200 was using. I believe the language before was something like an animal who deserved to be

00:18:01.200 utterly destroyed along with Iranian civilization. So the tune has changed. The desire for a deal is 1.00

00:18:06.740 clearly at the forefront of the president's mind maybe the iranian regime is trying to make sure

00:18:12.260 that the president is you know is as irinic at the moment as he seems to be that's just a that's

00:18:19.600 just a guess because the thing is thomas this crisis with the strait of hormuz it doesn't only

00:18:26.720 affect iran it doesn't only affect the middle east it affects the entire global economy so this

00:18:32.840 situation can't carry on indefinitely and Trump must know that and so must the Americans.

00:18:40.360 Trump must know that. I think Richard probably can speak better to what might be going on in

00:18:47.000 President Trump's mind. I find it to be almost impossible to make sense of much of what Trump

00:18:53.800 does or thinks. I'm a little bit, I'm sure compared to Richard, a little bit less inclined to be

00:19:00.440 generous to Trump. He doesn't seem to be anything like a strategic genius at all. I think it's all

00:19:08.600 pretty ad hoc. I think it is just possible that President Trump may feel that the political

00:19:17.580 consequences of liberating the Strait of Hormuz and, as it were, finishing the job, which the

00:19:24.340 hawks within the American security establishment still wish to happen, which his allies in the

00:19:31.960 region wish to happen, certainly Israel, but also in the Gulf. He may feel that the political

00:19:38.060 consequences are just too costly to bear and that the world will adjust. It is obviously

00:19:45.640 catastrophic to the global economy that the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for as long as it has

00:19:50.980 been. It will not reopen probably all summer. The president is desperate that the World Cup

00:19:58.700 in America and Canada and Mexico go without a hitch. Eamon, my co-host, knows that the

00:20:05.320 intelligence chatter is that the Iranian regime has, under the surface, definitely threatened

00:20:11.320 to attack players, whatever, to have some kind of terrorist campaign during the World Cup to

00:20:19.420 humiliate America. I think Donald Trump is desperate for that not to happen, given the kind

00:20:24.400 of guy he is. He comes from the world of entertainment. He does not want his show

00:20:27.940 to be spoiled. I think he might be calculating that, though it is catastrophic, the world does

00:20:34.060 adjust. Already, the world is adjusting. It will take some time. There will be a global recession

00:20:40.100 for sure. It won't be easy. But if the Strait of Hormuz remains for some time, more or less within

00:20:48.040 Iran's sphere of influence, devastating as that will be to the global economy in the short term, 0.91

00:20:54.280 to the regional Gulf and Arabian, not just economies, political economy in the long term. 0.97

00:21:00.200 Nonetheless, contingencies will play a role. Saudi Arabia is already trying to maximize

00:21:11.960 its west coast along the Red Sea. Perhaps that will really change things. Syria

00:21:16.600 is immediately gearing up to play a much more important regional hub role as supply lanes and

00:21:24.680 trade routes shift in the face of this. Obviously, the Fujairah port, which the UAE

00:21:31.220 has on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz, will be invested in more. Who knows?

00:21:39.460 That's a long-winded answer to your question. I mean, we're in that place now where, frankly,

00:21:46.180 nobody knows it this is it's a sort of weird time to be paying attention to the middle east because

00:21:51.940 many scenarios which people like richard and me for a long time regarded as worst case scenarios

00:22:00.340 have happened so it's now they've happened and you think oh okay what's what's what next it's hard to

00:22:07.060 know. It's a very good point about worst case scenarios because if we're looking at what's

00:22:16.480 happening in the Middle East, there doesn't seem to be an exit point at this moment. And that's a 0.98

00:22:24.080 real concern. I think the moment when you really get worried about a situation is where you can

00:22:29.760 see no clear way out. Is that me being overly pessimistic or do you share that analysis, Thomas?

00:22:37.060 I mean, I can't see a way out. Donald Trump says he wants a deal. Perhaps he will get that deal. Some people say that deal will be obviously worse than the JCPOA deal that Obama's administration signed and which Donald Trump left in his first term.

00:22:57.500 Others, other people say, no, no, Donald Trump would never allow that to happen.

00:23:01.260 So obviously it will not be as bad a deal as the JCPOA, which some people say wasn't even a bad deal.

00:23:06.060 So, you know, this is there are so many differences of opinion on that question.

00:23:09.800 So if Donald Trump gets a deal, if somehow that deal can include Iran relinquishing its control of the Strait of Hormuz without any further military action, that strikes me as unlikely.

00:23:25.860 I don't really see a way out at the moment.

00:23:29.020 No, not one that doesn't include a resumption of ferocious hostilities.

00:23:35.740 Richard, I want to first of all give you the floor to address a bunch of points.

00:23:40.000 I do.

00:23:41.060 And also, let me just tee up one other thing I'd love for you to address in addition to

00:23:45.200 whatever it is that you want to bring up, which I'm sure is lots of things.

00:23:47.960 uh i mean one of the things thomas raises is this question of uh the idea that the global economy is

00:23:54.920 adjusting uh from where i'm sitting here in the uk that is not what we are seeing at all what we

00:24:01.020 are seeing is prices adjusting in a very upward direction very rapidly and in addition to that

00:24:07.280 it's quite clear that many many of the downstream consequences of the closure of the strait and this

00:24:12.760 more broadly are being stored up it's not like you know if you've got five months worth of supplies

00:24:19.980 of fertilizer or whatever it's not like the minute you start running them down everything goes to

00:24:26.100 shit it can take time to filter through and i we speak to a lot of people who are actually concerned

00:24:32.620 that the majority of the impact that is now inevitable has yet to be felt if that makes 0.96

00:24:38.900 any sense. Can you talk about that? I just did. I did say that global recession, global even

00:24:46.740 depression is inevitable. I did not say that the global economy is adjusting in any upward way. No,

00:24:52.740 no. Yeah, fair enough. Sorry. I certainly didn't mean to misrepresent anything you said. I just

00:24:57.280 want to dive into this. Let's talk about the global economy for a second. So there are adjustments

00:25:04.540 that would create downward pressure,

00:25:06.820 but they would take more than a year

00:25:08.560 to a year and a half to arrive.

00:25:10.820 So one of them is ExxonMobil in Nigeria

00:25:14.460 is looking at getting into the

00:25:18.580 fertilizer production business.

00:25:20.600 As you know, to make fertilizer,

00:25:22.480 you need natural gas,

00:25:23.640 which the Nigerians have large amounts of.

00:25:27.160 It would be smart for ExxonMobil to do this

00:25:29.760 because the markets that are most starved

00:25:32.760 for fertilizer are in West Africa, Southern Africa,

00:25:38.640 and nearby in South America, right?

00:25:43.160 The regulatory apparatus in the United States,

00:25:46.800 if Trump people were able to get it out of the way,

00:25:50.580 could also make large investments.

00:25:53.480 And one scenario, which the agriculture,

00:25:56.380 the people have been speculating about,

00:25:58.720 the agriculture department in the United States,

00:26:00.860 is deregulating the production of fertilizer in the U.S.,

00:26:05.500 which would mean that the U.S.

00:26:06.760 would become a net exporter of fertilizer,

00:26:11.360 and it would create a tremendous number of jobs

00:26:13.840 in the lower Midwestern United States,

00:26:15.640 along the Mississippi Delta mainly,

00:26:18.320 and that would be, because that's where the gas is,

00:26:21.040 and that's where the river travel is, right?

00:26:24.380 But these are multi-hundred billion dollar

00:26:27.960 capital investments, and to do that,

00:26:30.020 needs to be regulatory certainty and there's no way to do that this year because no one knows who's

00:26:34.100 going to win the midterms um and uh it also takes a long time to deregulate because you have to

00:26:40.740 publish notice and public comment period of at least 90 to 120 days and then you have to respond

00:26:46.420 to the comments and even if they started last month they wouldn't be done before the end of

00:26:51.460 the year just the drawn out process and congress which could write a law tomorrow um and pass it

00:26:59.300 speedily um through reconciliation which is this enormous reconciliation package they could attach

00:27:04.580 it to uh it has no no real desire to do anything dramatic right there so uh food world food prices

00:27:14.420 will continue to remain high because fertilizer prices will remain high plus energy prices will

00:27:18.820 remain high and any downward adjustment would take a at best case scenario a year and a half

00:27:25.940 but look at what also is what else is also happening the israelis are starting to think

00:27:30.980 about how the gaza port could be restored and how pipelines uh could come to gaza crossing

00:27:37.780 israeli territory from you know iraq through syria up from the gulf through kuwait iraq syria and

00:27:45.220 then down and then be exported to the world out of the port of gaza again that's years away but that

00:27:51.700 is a fundamental rerouting uh i had lunch with a senior executive uh from dubai ports world which

00:27:59.940 is the largest port operator in the world and they're based as the name implies in the uae

00:28:07.060 and obviously they're suffering greatly uh from not being able to move any real traffic through

00:28:14.100 the gulf uh the port of the strait of hormuz but they're ramping up their port activity elsewhere

00:28:20.580 so the world economy will adjust will it adjust this year no there's just no way that it can

00:28:26.740 adjust that quickly and people have to propose plans those plans have to be get investment

00:28:34.420 behind them they have to get the regulators approval then you actually have to build the

00:28:37.940 things necessary right so if if you want to solve the oil crisis this year we have to start by 0.91

00:28:45.940 admitting that a major cause of this beyond the Iranians is the Europeans. Their net zero, 0.97

00:28:52.940 their unwillingness to drill for gas and oil in the mainland of the Netherlands, which they've

00:29:00.960 had some of the largest gas fields in the world, they're shutting those down. The North Sea

00:29:05.540 developments are coming down. The EU regulations that prevent fracking in Poland and in the Czech

00:29:12.900 republic uh the unwillingness of the brits to dig coal uh i talked to two former conservative

00:29:21.220 members of parliament a week ago and i'm like why haven't you reopened the coal pits and start

00:29:27.060 selling coal to germany which is paying way above the market price and the answer is oh it's just 0.93

00:29:32.020 not practical to do that um meaning they haven't thought about it and they're as brain dead as

00:29:36.500 conservative the conservative party has always been right instead of having imagination for the

00:29:41.620 working man they said to me oh well some of those mines are flooded i said yeah if only there was an

00:29:47.820 invention especially designed for coal mines yeah james watt 1750 that's why the steam engine was

00:29:56.080 created to take water out of coal mines specifically you have the technology right you can use electric

00:30:01.960 you don't use steam but you could remove the water from the mines and of course america it's

00:30:07.200 ideological we know it's ideological teresa may the former conservative prime minister has been

00:30:12.080 on twitter banging on about how net zero has been brilliant because we've created about three jobs

00:30:16.940 but um you know the question would not be so bad if net zero and the precautionary principle were

00:30:24.300 not matters of u law right of course and and the brain dead conservatives in the uk have no heart

00:30:32.520 or imagination for the working class person for whom earning $100,000 a year working as a coal

00:30:38.420 miner would be a very happy outcome in many parts of the north and the west of your country. And

00:30:44.900 they have no ability to think about them. They think about people who have horses and estates

00:30:50.020 and things like that. We're running out of those people as well. Richard, I want to ask you about

00:30:56.380 why we haven't got to a ceasefire of,

00:31:00.500 or in fact, more progress

00:31:01.900 beyond the short ceasefire that we had.

00:31:03.360 Before I do that,

00:31:04.160 we'll just have a quick word

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00:31:08.080 And we'll come back

00:31:08.640 and we'll talk about why peace hasn't come yet.

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00:33:46.780 well i don't know about you there's nothing i love more than the sight of francis peddling

00:33:52.120 sheath underwear while wearing a suit i think that's a great look i'm afraid francis i just 0.85

00:33:57.560 i now just have your balls in my mind i'm just like oh my lord well there you go francis you've 0.77

00:34:03.280 made a friend tonight uh richard coming back to the serious conversation we were having 0.97

00:34:11.780 Why is it that we haven't got peace already?

00:34:17.480 Iran, well, does Iran want, 0.89

00:34:19.940 does the people who run Iran want peace? 0.88

00:34:24.160 No, they want nuclear weapons. 0.74

00:34:26.660 That's what they want.

00:34:28.060 And Trump says they can't have them.

00:34:30.420 So, right.

00:34:31.040 So to wear down Western resistance,

00:34:35.740 in this case, Trumpian resistance,

00:34:37.500 to their possession of nuclear weapons,

00:34:39.680 because they want to turn out like North Korea. 0.96

00:34:43.220 They want the security that North Korea has. 0.84

00:34:48.200 The only way to get there is to have nuclear weapons. 0.84

00:34:50.600 The only way to get nuclear weapons is to get the U.S. to relent.

00:34:53.720 So they think they can cause enough short-term pain

00:34:56.580 because their experience of American leaders from Carter onward

00:35:01.080 was that if you exert enough negative pressure in the short term,

00:35:06.960 Americans just give up and go away.

00:35:09.680 And they do not understand Trump.

00:35:15.660 Let me explain why Trump is not ad hoc, that he is strategic.

00:35:21.800 It is very counterintuitive, right?

00:35:24.800 And you may totally disagree with me, but it's worth considering this hypothesis.

00:35:31.280 If you don't have the time to read Art of the Deal, which actually he lays this out, right?

00:35:35.380 so the normal way politics or change in academia or change in the NGO world or change in the

00:35:44.180 business world happens is some leader comes down from the mountain and says I have a vision here

00:35:50.880 it is here's you know my beautiful powerpoints here's my white papers here's my positions

00:35:56.400 isn't it a glorious future let's all work together towards this glorious future and he tries to get

00:36:02.840 various constituencies to go along, makes a couple of compromises here and there, and eventually

00:36:07.720 builds something like a majority behind whatever that is, and they do it. And it's a long deliberative

00:36:13.240 process. That is not how Trump operates. Trump thinks this is all a negotiation. And a negotiation,

00:36:22.520 no smart person starts the negotiation by saying what they want as the outcome,

00:36:27.740 because they will not get that outcome. 0.99

00:36:31.120 If a woman tells you on a first date 1.00

00:36:33.020 that she would like to be married 1.00

00:36:34.160 and have a baby in six months,

00:36:36.380 most men would say no second date, right? 0.97

00:36:41.580 This is how real estate deals work.

00:36:45.060 And that is a definitive crucible

00:36:48.280 for understanding how Trump's thinking was shaped.

00:36:52.900 You know, I may be interested in restoring that building

00:36:55.740 that is in your dilapidated downtown.

00:36:57.740 but I would need a lot of tax breaks and I would need you to build a new entrance to the subway

00:37:04.360 and I would need the sidewalk, right? You throw all these things out and maybe you need one of

00:37:10.460 them, but you lay out all the things and then you're so dismissive. Oh, well, you know, the

00:37:16.380 sidewalk things, that wasn't really anything. And you eventually get to somewhere that only you have

00:37:22.060 in mind all along that's how trump works so the fact that he's changed his mind or he's calling

00:37:30.320 someone an animal uh one month and calling them a patriot the next none of that matters he has a

00:37:37.380 goal he's not going to tell you the goal because he wants to achieve the goal and the big big

00:37:43.720 picture here is and i i suspect this there's evidence for this but not enough evidence to

00:37:51.100 prove what I'm about to say. I suspect, strongly, based on lots of inferences, that at some point

00:37:59.340 early in this administration, Rubio and Trump got together and looked at a map of the world and said,

00:38:05.460 our main adversary is China. China has said publicly that it wants to go to war with the

00:38:12.020 United States in 2027. How do we make sure they do not go to war with the United States in 2027?

00:38:19.440 well let's weaken them around the world they are dependent on venezuelan oil let's take that away

00:38:26.900 from them they are dependent on cuban intelligence networks let's take that away from them they are

00:38:33.500 dependent on loan payments from costa rica nicaragua colombia let's take that away from them

00:38:39.360 They are dependent on Iranian oil and Iranian intelligence.

00:38:47.820 Let's take that away from them. 0.90

00:38:50.660 Let's take away the markets for Chinese consumer goods in Russia. 0.76

00:38:56.500 Let's not get involved in Ukraine, but let's make sure that China's main ally is, that is Russia,

00:39:06.040 is significantly weakened by letting the war in Ukraine drag on every day, not just causing

00:39:14.060 Russia blood and treasure, but diminishing the fearsome reputation of Vladimir Putin.

00:39:20.620 And so there is a grand global strategy here that is all directed at China. There's a reason why 0.67

00:39:28.700 remote Pacific Island bases that the U.S. has not used in World War II have been resurfaced,

00:39:34.740 and navigation beacons have been reestablished and why training missions are occurring in the

00:39:40.700 second island chain. There's a reason why U.S. naval forces are visiting Saipan and Guam for

00:39:47.860 the first time in decades. I mean, senior personnel. There's a reason why training exercises are being

00:39:53.760 planned with the Philippines. Also, look at the Straits of Malacca. So everyone talks about the 0.82

00:39:58.640 Strait of Hormuz. But Chinese oil also has to go through the Straits of Malacca between, you know,

00:40:05.040 off the Malaysian coast. Well, both Malaya and Indonesia, which have not been U.S. allies in

00:40:10.660 decades, now have made agreements in the past six months. So that, and India has moved from being a

00:40:19.880 non-aligned nation, unofficially aligned with Russia in the Cold War, to becoming effectively

00:40:26.700 a u.s ally and using its navy to stop the shadow fleet and reducing its refining of iranian oil

00:40:34.060 so if you take iranian oil from iran and you trace it it now has to go past india which is now more

00:40:41.020 or less in the u.s camp it has to thread its way through the straits of malacca past two new u.s

00:40:47.020 allies and then enter waters in long-time u.s allies the philippines and so on to get uh to

00:40:53.980 to where it's going. If you see it from that perspective, you understand why this was not a

00:41:00.240 war of choice. This is why Iran was, why they're doing Iran now, why they did Venezuela, why the

00:41:07.380 CIA and other U.S. interests are active in the Colombian election, why what's going on in Peru

00:41:13.820 and Nicaragua makes sense, why certain bases being re-established, why there's so much diplomacy

00:41:19.660 going on in the western pacific i mean connect all the dots because i guarantee you china has

00:41:27.060 and putin has well that's a fascinating point richard and thomas it seems to me one of the

00:41:34.900 things or one of the aspects of this conflict that we never talk about enough is lebanon and

00:41:41.120 hezbollah can you explain to the viewers and the listeners why lebanon is so crucial to this

00:41:47.840 particular conflict well because hezbollah is an extremely powerful less powerful now than it was

00:41:57.220 five years ago but a very powerful iranian backed iranian financed iranian organized iranian inspired

00:42:05.200 militia that has as its stated aim the you know the destruction of the state of israel in a way

00:42:12.360 I mean, it couches that in the same kind of resistance narrative that all of Israel's enemies couches their activities in.

00:42:20.780 But it remains there, you know, a non-state actor, totally destabilizing and having almost wrecked the salience of a Lebanese state for a long time. 0.50

00:42:32.300 It is Iran's, it's the sort of pointed end of Iran's proxy network right at Israel. 0.71

00:42:37.640 And so that's why, I mean, there you go.

00:42:40.340 So as long as Hezbollah exists and lobs missiles into Israel, requiring Israel for now over two years to essentially evacuate much of its northern territory, then Israel will want to deal with that situation. 0.78

00:42:56.880 And that will play an integral part in any larger Israeli plan to neutralize the threat of Iran in general and a nuclear Iran specifically. 0.65

00:43:08.140 Because the reality is, Thomas, and push back on this if you disagree with me, we cannot have peace in the Middle East. 0.79

00:43:15.820 We cannot have a ceasefire deal with Iran if we don't sort out the issue of Lebanon, but more pertinently, Hezbollah. 0.90

00:43:24.300 Well, you say that. I think one of the things that Donald Trump is trying to achieve at the moment, and may be working with Benjamin Netanyahu to achieve this,

00:43:32.440 that's what I was referring to earlier about the good cop, bad cop routine, that it seems

00:43:37.280 that Trump and Netanyahu are at daggers drawn now, but maybe that's more theatrics than we think.

00:43:44.520 And what's actually happening is that having mistakenly, at the time that the ceasefire

00:43:51.120 deal was being negotiated, kind of connected Lebanon and Hezbollah to an Iranian deal,

00:43:58.020 which the israelis immediately said look we haven't agreed to this hezbollah is a separate

00:44:03.460 issue and it's between us and them this has nothing to do with iran there should not be an

00:44:09.420 iranian-backed proxy in in lebanon on our border we do not you know we do not need the permission

00:44:15.920 of the government in tehran to attack the people who are attacking us etc so when the the ceasefire

00:44:22.920 deal that came into effect in early april was being negotiated it seems from what i understand

00:44:27.740 almost like accidentally, inadvertently, incompetently, the two issues were connected.

00:44:32.920 And Iran could say, look, no progress on the Hezbollah front or any outbreak of hostilities

00:44:40.900 between Israel and Hezbollah is a de facto violation of any ceasefire on our part. So we

00:44:46.120 can start the war again on that side. So they're trying to disconnect those two files. So it's not

00:44:51.760 that they have to be both solved at the same time. That is the Iranian position. They have to be

00:44:56.680 solved at the same time. That is not the Israeli position, and it is really not the American 0.80

00:45:02.640 position either, not really. Everyone would love those two sort of situations to be disconnected.

00:45:09.860 The question is, can Iran be compelled to agree to that disconnection? I think Israel's attack 0.96

00:45:15.680 over the weekend on Iran, to which Iran waved the white flag. It basically was like, okay, 0.52

00:45:22.720 okay, okay, okay, we won't fight back. They pretended that it was a great victory for

00:45:28.480 themselves, of course, but it definitely was not. Israel made sure of that, only to be followed the 0.96

00:45:34.840 next day by this attack on the Apache helicopter. That's what I meant earlier about now they might

00:45:39.280 be, they sort of tested Netanyahu. They realized, okay, he fought back. Will Trump fight back?

00:45:44.720 Trump has said he's going to fight back. We wait to see if that's the case. But all of this is to

00:45:48.780 some extent involved in the making of a deal so that and that deal must be disconnected from

00:45:54.460 hezbollah because as with all things middle eastern the more you look into it the more

00:46:01.460 complicated it becomes why do you think i have this long white beard i've lost my mind

00:46:06.680 i thought it was your love of gandalf i actually what i want to respond a little bit to to what

00:46:15.840 you said, Richard, earlier about the China thing. At the beginning of this conflict,

00:46:21.240 Haviv Ghor, the Israeli journalist, published that piece, which made a splash, in which he

00:46:28.640 laid out his analysis saying that, look, no one is noticing the truth, that this is all about China.

00:46:34.460 It made a brief splash, and then it went underground, and that kind of narrative seemed

00:46:38.560 to go away. In the Middle East, they did not like that narrative. They did not want people

00:46:44.840 to be thinking that this was all about China, because it drew attention away from the fact

00:46:49.620 that it should be about Iran. It should be about that actual genuine threat to all of those 0.95

00:46:54.760 countries. And that if it actually is just a larger global geopolitical game, where we're

00:47:01.860 containing China or countering Chinese moves, then we're back into a Cold War world where

00:47:07.200 everything is about the Soviet Union. And therefore, whole regions of the world can be

00:47:13.540 laid waste in pursuit of that larger goal. It doesn't really matter if we spend 12 years

00:47:20.100 destroying Vietnam. It doesn't matter because we're countering the Soviet Union in some way. 0.80

00:47:25.920 So the Gulf especially, but the Middle East more generally, would be very disturbed if it was the 0.62

00:47:32.800 case that this situation had been allowed to play out in this rather shambolic way in their backyard

00:47:39.820 to further larger global, you know, objectives by the American administration.

00:47:46.460 I'm not saying you're wrong.

00:47:47.520 It's actually, it seems very reasonable that what you're saying is true.

00:47:50.520 But that is, that would be very sort of nerve, you know, nervous making for America's allies

00:47:57.160 in the Middle East.

00:47:58.840 And Thomas, speaking of America's allies in the Middle East, what is your assessment of

00:48:04.220 where they are at the moment?

00:48:05.560 forget the China issue, just this war, you know, there were different people saying different

00:48:11.600 things at the outset. But I think it's fair to say it's gone on a bit, right? I just think I

00:48:16.660 think that's objectively a reasonable thing to say. I think at the time that it began,

00:48:21.060 only Trump's critics were saying that it would take as long as it did. And all of his allies

00:48:25.760 were saying, you know, I think the title of our Ted Cruz episode is we will win this end quickly.

00:48:31.160 I just, I think we've gone beyond quickly at this point. And I remember at the time there being quite a lot of enthusiasm from places like the UAE, from places like Saudi Arabia, because obviously Iran is a strategic adversary for them. Has that enthusiasm waned or are they keen for President Trump to see it through and do they believe he can? 0.61

00:48:53.480 well first on the on the question of how long the campaign was going to last despite what some

00:49:00.600 people were saying middle eastern allies of the united states did not think that the campaign

00:49:05.640 would be like quick they're not stupid they know what iran is they look across the gulf and they

00:49:12.920 see that wall of mountains protecting the iranian plateau i mean iran is not a pushover nation so

00:49:21.800 So the Arabian allies were not unaware of that.

00:49:27.000 Now, sadly, the realities of democratic, I mean, electoral politics in the West means

00:49:32.620 you have to, I don't know if you notice, guys, you got to promise people all sorts

00:49:36.180 of stuff that's not in any way realistic all the time.

00:49:40.000 And so on the one hand, people are saying, it'll be fast, it'll be fast.

00:49:43.400 But the Middle Eastern allies knew it wouldn't be fast.

00:49:46.900 I wondered at one point whether Donald Trump knew it wouldn't be fast.

00:49:50.440 Now, that's, I think, not necessarily what I think now. I think he did think it could be quite, quite easy, you know, easily achieved. So that's, that's, that's one thing. Sorry, what was the other aspect of what you asked?

00:50:03.120 I guess what I was asking is, in terms of the Arabian allies, are they happy with the situation and are they prepared to see it through?

00:50:13.440 happy with the situation no and also that now we remember it's not correct to say that they were

00:50:18.640 enthusiastic exactly you know the whole war that was launched on the 28th of february

00:50:24.880 did sort of happen in a quite unexpected and chaotic way the the region was adjusting to

00:50:32.240 decisions that the white house took when the protests were launched at the end of december

00:50:37.200 early january and donald trump began to tweet those very heroic tweets that we all remember

00:50:42.880 we're coming to your rescue go out protest now my understanding is that that was not pre-planned

00:50:49.520 that response to those protests was not actually in a coordinated way planned and it moved forward

00:50:58.160 some plans for resuming the aggression against iran which last june had had a first phase it

00:51:04.880 forced it to move forward a few months that's my understanding it makes sense of what actually

00:51:10.640 happened and the gulf allies were therefore wary of the drumbeat of war starting in january and

00:51:18.480 then continuing into february that's why at the time you remember those reports saying things like

00:51:24.400 you know the crown prince of saudi arabia mbs saying publicly you know we need to return to

00:51:30.160 diplomacy but then calls to donald trump being like go for it go for it the truth is actually

00:51:36.320 more in the middle. Those calls to Donald Trump were like, go for it if you have a plan. Is this

00:51:43.340 going to work? Are you doing this properly? Because if you're not, I have to certainly in

00:51:49.600 public say I'm against it because I don't want Iran to be attacking me. By the way, what is your

00:51:54.860 plan, Mr. President? No description of that plan forthcoming. The Arab allies have been kept very

00:52:01.800 much in the dark throughout this process. They are very fed up. My co-host Amon the other day

00:52:07.300 revealed that in a private meeting with a very high-ranking Gulf minister, the Gulf minister

00:52:14.580 actually confessed that it is becoming increasingly clear to him and to his colleagues that it would

00:52:20.380 have been better if Kamala Harris had won the election. They are extremely disappointed in

00:52:26.980 how Donald Trump has prosecuted this conflict and the trust levels on the Gulf side are very low at

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00:53:03.960 very interesting richard i'm sure you have plenty to say so go for it

00:53:08.300 i mean the gulf people are deeply unhappy for lots of objectively observable reasons

00:53:15.940 first of all they have to make a lot of their water through desalinization which is a very

00:53:24.480 energy intensive process desalination plants not only cost billions of dollars but they're gigantic 0.99

00:53:31.000 very easy for shahid drones to hit um and it doesn't take much to put a relatively small

00:53:40.260 damage to send a shutter through the UAE or for Bahrain that they will be out of water there's

00:53:47.220 no readily nearby place where they can import water and not and there are no existing pipelines

00:53:52.500 to move it so we tend to focus on the other fluid which is oil which is how they make their money

00:54:00.180 but without water they die and their desalinization plants are on the coast right as you'd expect

00:54:08.340 so they're very easy to hit uh and even small strikes are red alert news across the gulf

00:54:19.020 so they feel very vulnerable um however we see that they're starting to realize that they're

00:54:26.680 going to have to get into this fight uae has decided in the last few weeks not just to leave

00:54:32.900 OPAC, which at another point in time would be a giant headline. But also, and they're financing

00:54:40.800 pipelines to go around the Strait of Hormuz into Oman to deliver their oil to tankers outside the 0.51

00:54:50.440 Strait that the Iranians can't shut off. That'll take months, if not a year, more to complete those

00:54:57.820 pipelines. There's some temporary pipelines, which have very small volumes. But if you notice,

00:55:05.100 other than leaving OPEC, they're starting to crack down on the immense amounts of Iranian money

00:55:11.520 being held in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and starting to cooperate with SWIFT, with the U.S. Treasury,

00:55:19.360 and others on seizing Iranian funds. So this means that while they tremble in fear for what

00:55:27.120 Iran could do to their people also have taken a side, and it's not for peace. They understand 0.51

00:55:33.700 this war is going to be, if the Iranians want to fight a war, it's continue to fight a war, 0.70

00:55:38.340 which they seem to. It's going to be long. It's going to be a long slog. I should say a word 0.76

00:55:45.940 about geography here, because people have trouble mentally picturing Iran. If you were to pick

00:55:55.580 iran up and drop it over the continental united states it would take most of the territory

00:56:02.120 from the atlantic to the mississippi river it's a nation of 93 million people if you believe the

00:56:09.560 latest census count which is maybe it's off three or four million one way or the other but it's

00:56:13.780 it's it's a very large population and very as this map shows very mountainous territory

00:56:19.180 So you have a Persian Gulf coast that is nearly waterless with no navigable rivers, letting seaborn traffic go significantly inland.

00:56:33.900 Very little population on the coast and almost 100 miles before you get to anything green.

00:56:41.040 And that only begins as the elevation steeply climbs.

00:56:44.400 I mean, if you remember, if you read Marco Polo's diary as a kid, the enormous angles and complexity of scaling those mountains, it's a fortress.

00:56:59.820 It's a fortress, they think, given to them by Almighty God.

00:57:03.840 and if you tried to use ground forces first of all supplying them with water food ammunition

00:57:10.640 and replacements would expose a hundred miles or more of logistical chains that would be perfect

00:57:17.520 targets for artillery missiles and drones but once you got to the mountains you would be fighting

00:57:23.520 inch by inch and the iranians are very good engineers at tunneling at bunkering

00:57:31.600 that would be more of a slaughter than the U.S. taking the bunkered positions of the Japanese in

00:57:40.220 the Pacific War. So it's just unthinkable. And they are surrounded to the north by their ally

00:57:50.000 Russia, by Pakistan, which is sort of an ally of the United States, but sort of an ally of theirs.

00:57:56.420 Bear in mind that the Iranian interest section, which is their version of an embassy,

00:58:00.660 under current diplomatic law is inside the pakistan embassy so if you want a visa to go

00:58:06.440 to iran if you have family there you go to the pakistan embassy to do it here in washington

00:58:10.580 so the idea that pakistan would be all that helpful to the u.s is i mean it's a remarkable

00:58:18.660 richard that you say that because you know it's you know pakistan has been mediating this deal 0.92

00:58:23.240 a really remarkable rather stupid part of this entire you know well charade they are not 0.98

00:58:31.420 trustworthy mediators whatsoever they have lots of skin in the game on all in all sorts of ways 0.98

00:58:36.040 there's tremendous corruption involved in this and so you know i don't i haven't read the art

00:58:42.360 of the deal i have to admit i haven't read it but i am not seeing being played out in front of my

00:58:48.500 eyes, a great deal maker making a great and beautiful deal. It does not seem like that to me.

00:58:56.240 It seems like he's making it up as he goes along. Yes, but you have a professional class bias. You're

00:59:02.540 expecting him to act like a professional that announces a big vision. I am part of the

00:59:07.360 professional class. You don't know me. I do not have a professional class bias. I do have a human

00:59:12.180 bias of rationality as the primary driving force of decision making. Now, maybe I don't

00:59:18.400 Well, rationality is whether the means lead you to your stated goals.

00:59:24.520 Which we don't know.

00:59:25.660 So the trouble I have in general with people who maintain faith in Donald Trump is they can always say, ah, but he hasn't told us what he wants.

00:59:34.860 So we can't actually judge him by any standard of success because we don't know what he wants.

00:59:40.600 Now, okay, great.

00:59:41.840 It's good.

00:59:42.540 It's good for him.

00:59:43.380 It's a good way of maintaining power to keep everyone unable from reaching a conclusion

00:59:49.920 as to whether he's good or bad at his job because he's not giving you a standard of

00:59:53.340 success.

00:59:54.620 That's what it seems like to me.

00:59:55.520 Well, no, hold on.

00:59:56.360 On this, I think on this is there's a very clear standard of success, which is do you

01:00:00.660 get, I mean, the minimum, I would say, do you get a better deal than the JCPOA for a

01:00:06.320 start?

01:00:06.860 But ultimately, the measure of success is do you end up with a run that doesn't get

01:00:11.380 nukes or at least in the next 30 years right that's the standard and i think you're kind of

01:00:17.340 both right i i am very much torn between the two arguments you're making because um the one thing

01:00:23.240 that we do not know objectively is how this is going to end it could end with a big beautiful

01:00:28.500 deal in which case richard will come out of this looking great or it could end up in a deal that

01:00:36.320 is is attempted to be sold as a great beautiful deal that is as bad if not worse on the jcpa

01:00:42.480 and richard i will put this to you right clear based on everything i am definitely not predicting

01:00:49.280 a deal what i described earlier is how trump's negotiation strategy works i think it's ultimately

01:00:56.000 going to be forced into a situation where he has to take a large amount of kinetic military action

01:01:04.000 uh because ultimately the iranians do not want to deal and you know no matter how warm the bowl

01:01:13.840 becomes it can't make the soup warm right that's why that iranian problem it's true you did say 0.84

01:01:19.840 that at the beginning and i agreed with it you know i think when you said that this is how you

01:01:25.180 know donald trump's way of operating is the way a real estate developer operates you know but maybe

01:01:30.240 to a hammer, every problem is a nail. Maybe to a real estate developer, every problem is a real

01:01:38.260 estate deal. But it is not a real estate deal in Iran. That is not what he is facing. So if he is 0.96

01:01:45.140 operating under that assumption, then he is being led down the primrose path by an Iranian class 0.96

01:01:52.880 of leadership of leaders who I sometimes think we all forget are crazy in the way they see the 0.99

01:02:01.600 world they are crazy people in terms of their ideology you know I mean I don't mean the Iranian 0.89

01:02:08.300 people they're not they they're not crazy they're just not us oh okay that's true I mean I you can

01:02:19.240 If honor and Islamic ideology are the two most important things in your life, they're not irrational.

01:02:28.440 Oh, but I'm not talking about honor and Islamic Islam. 0.52

01:02:30.740 They're arguing from a set of premises that we don't share.

01:02:34.800 They are highly intelligent.

01:02:37.360 They are capable of long-term planning.

01:02:39.700 They should not be underestimated.

01:02:41.520 And they have spent decades digging these tunnels and digging these bunkers,

01:02:46.780 not just for their atomic weapons but for their conventional weapons and the after action review

01:02:51.820 is showing to the pentagon's horror that the iranians have repaired and rebuilt a lot of the

01:02:56.940 things that the americans bombed and that some of the bombing that the u.s carried out was incomplete

01:03:03.740 and that many military targets remain so they do not feel militarily defeated

01:03:08.700 and they have not thought they've lost their grip on the country.

01:03:14.620 So they are very determined foes. 0.99

01:03:20.320 I'm not saying that they're stupid. 0.99

01:03:24.660 I'm not saying that they're lazy. 1.00

01:03:26.260 I'm not saying that they're not talented.

01:03:28.200 I'm not saying that.

01:03:28.880 I'm saying that they're not real estate developers.

01:03:32.440 They don't see the world in those terms.

01:03:34.160 You know, if they if the Iranian regime was led by people who wanted, you know, wealth to make mutually beneficial deals with people to grow their economy and all that stuff, then everything in the whole frickin world would be different. 0.65

01:03:50.340 But they're not like that. They actually want to conquer the Middle East and not only want to believe it is a preordained fact that they will do it because God is on their side. 0.90

01:04:00.240 yes it's a very different mentality but donald trump is not treating them like that's what they

01:04:06.460 are it's it's beggars belief it's almost like he can't imagine that there could be people out there

01:04:12.160 who when it comes to it aren't property developers right war is about real estate but it's not

01:04:20.440 truly about real estate it involves real estate right uh right it's like the old one about the

01:04:27.260 ham and eggs, right? The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed, right?

01:04:33.880 It's an old Democratic Party saying. But anyway, look, the Iranians face incredible downsides from 1.00

01:04:43.580 making a deal and no real upside. Why should they? Right. The longer they make, in their minds, 1.00

01:04:52.340 they're making Netanyahu and Trump suffer. They believe Israeli and Western media that both of

01:04:59.380 those leaders are hanging on by their fingernails. They see a number of events on the calendar,

01:05:04.940 World Cup, just one of them, where they will exert outsized pressure. They know elections

01:05:10.820 are coming in both countries. So they think time is on their side and they have the powerful

01:05:16.500 position, why should they compromise and yield now? And the welfare of the people is simply not

01:05:25.000 a concern at all. I mean, 70% of Iran suffers electricity and water shortages. The inflation

01:05:32.800 rate is climbing towards 40% per month. Counterfeiting has become a real issue.

01:05:39.620 Their global market for oil is disappearing, and their source of foreign capital is,

01:05:44.280 By any, pick your favorite measure, they're losing in all of them. If they cared at all about maximizing the welfare of their people, they would be acting differently. But the fact of the matter is that those things, you know, are the temperature in Peru as far as they're concerned. They're numbers about distant, unimportant matters.

01:06:06.800 so the question that trump faces in iran is ironically the same question he faces in fighting

01:06:14.320 harvard in fighting the trade deals and so on how do you remove an entrenched elite that benefits

01:06:22.940 from the current situation and thinks it has a right to rule forever when it is neglecting

01:06:28.940 the people that it claims to speak for who are clearly suffering he has that problem in iran

01:06:35.260 He has that problem in domestic politics, he has that problem in trade politics, he has that problem with China, and so on.

01:06:43.620 How do you detach the meat from the host it lives on?

01:06:49.000 From the parasite that is living off the body, right?

01:06:54.260 How do you do that?

01:06:57.840 And also, there's another part of this puzzle, which is Netanyahu.

01:07:03.240 because America wants their deal,

01:07:06.400 but also Israel wants a different deal as well, don't they?

01:07:11.780 What makes you think the deal is different?

01:07:14.480 What makes me think the deal is different? 1.00

01:07:16.540 Because what I think that Israel want

01:07:20.480 is they want to wipe Hezbollah off the map. 1.00

01:07:24.480 Yeah, probably Trump does too. 0.88

01:07:27.500 Sorry?

01:07:28.860 Probably Trump does too.

01:07:30.260 i think but i may be wrong on this but i think trump prizes expediency over everything else

01:07:37.000 i think that if he can get a deal done which will paper over the cracks and it will last

01:07:41.940 three to five years and that he can dress that up as a win and then head over to the midterms

01:07:47.480 wave wave the con wave the deal say peace in our time i think he would be very happy with that i

01:07:53.920 I think we do need to always disentangle, even in the case of someone like Donald Trump, who's a real political animal, the political dimension from the sort of statesman dimension.

01:08:05.760 I mean, I think, despite everything I've said about Donald Trump, and I'm very frustrated with the man, but I don't think Donald Trump is under any illusions that Hezbollah and Hamas and other parts of Iran's proxy network across the region are anything but horrible, malign actors that get in the way of America's strategic interest.

01:08:25.260 I mean, unlike some of his predecessors in the White House who were happier to accommodate Iran's proxy network in the region or to just kind of assume that they had to be worked with.

01:08:41.820 Now, maybe time will tell that that whole side of the American foreign policy personnel

01:08:49.880 who argued in terms of containment of Iran, engagement with Iran, and that's what underlay

01:08:56.960 the JCPOA, and which sometimes pissed off our Arab allies in the region because they

01:09:04.920 saw a Shia crescent being created and the Houthi takeover of Yemen and all that. 0.96

01:09:10.080 So there was a period of time when the American policy apparatus was like, no, we might hate Iran, but we're just, they're here. They're here to stay. We can't do anything about it. We just got to work with them. Maybe this recent adventure in the Middle East is proving them right. And maybe we just can't get rid of these people. So maybe we just have to live with them. I don't know. 1.00

01:09:29.200 But I don't think Trump thinks that. And I don't think that Trump, you know, Trump has been very good at enabling the Israelis to do what they feel they need to do to destroy Hamas, to destroy Hezbollah. Now, you can disagree with that policy, but Trump, I don't think, has disagreed with that policy. And that's different from the politics of it.

01:09:48.240 Yes, he needs a quick win in order to win the midterms.

01:09:51.520 He cares about poll numbers.

01:09:53.440 He also cares about the stock market, which is a massive problem in this whole thing,

01:09:58.060 because people in his family and certainly in his coterie have got very rich on and off

01:10:04.280 over the course of this very wild time. 0.99

01:10:06.720 So he cares about those things, but I also think he does know that Hezbollah needs to 0.93

01:10:11.980 be destroyed if there is going to be anything like a well-governed Middle East. 0.58

01:10:18.240 Francis, let me jump in very quickly. Richard, hold on one sec. Perhaps a better challenge to separate the foreign policy and military policy of Israel and that of the United States is to say that what I understand Israel would really like to do is to bomb Iran back to the Middle Ages where they don't have any missiles, they don't have any drones, they don't have any serious military manufacturing. 0.65

01:10:43.180 They pose no threat whatsoever to Israel.

01:10:46.760 They don't have the money to fund Hamas.

01:10:48.880 They don't have the money to fund Hezbollah, whereas for Trump, the priority is obviously

01:10:53.940 the nuclear side of it.

01:10:55.100 Isn't that a big difference between them, Richard?

01:11:01.260 I don't think at the strategic level there is a significant difference between how Trump

01:11:07.460 and Netanyahu see the Israeli and U.S. interests.

01:11:11.720 I mean, it's it's useful theater. 0.55

01:11:14.920 I think you take your point of good cop, bad cop.

01:11:19.340 Here's what Donald Trump knows.

01:11:20.780 You have to look at what happened in Donald Trump's formative years.

01:11:25.100 What were the events occurring when Donald Trump was in the early prime of his life?

01:11:31.700 Hezbollah in the 1980s killed more Americans than any other terrorist group in history, with the exception of al Qaeda itself.

01:11:40.840 so there is no there is a tendency in the biden and obama years to view hezbollah the kind of way 0.80

01:11:49.600 management deals with the union right like oh i hate the fact we have to deal with them

01:11:54.460 but they're part of the landscape and they have a right to be here kind of we have to make the

01:11:59.600 best deal we can it's not how donald trump sees it he i guarantee you that if you were asked him

01:12:08.060 what happened on the achille laureau in 1985 he could tell you right i guarantee you he could

01:12:14.700 tell you about the various terrorist strikes and uh u.s navy personnel who was murdered on a hijacked

01:12:21.980 airplane uh loudly saying the our father in english by the way as he was killed by his

01:12:27.900 captors in front of a plane load of people right this makes a deep impression on two important

01:12:33.340 people, Donald Trump and Susie Wiles as chief of staff, who this was a living adult memory for

01:12:40.540 them. They lived through this. So the idea that they've decided that they're going to just

01:12:45.060 separate the way the State Department would like to do, Hezbollah from Iran and say, well, 0.66

01:12:50.020 we're going to have to live with Hezbollah. That's not the case. I mean, that's as plausible.

01:12:55.300 And if you look at the White House's reaction to the seizure of the crusader castle just north of

01:13:03.180 Latani River in Lebanon. You know what the reaction was? Nothing. No protest. No, oh,

01:13:11.780 you've colored outside the lines. Just nothing. That took away a prime sniper and mortar position

01:13:18.340 from Hezbollah because that was the high point on the far side of the river, right? 0.91

01:13:25.580 This, the fact that there are air raid warning signs now in Christian neighborhoods 0.88

01:13:30.200 in Beirut, they are prepared to go north. And I don't think Trump will meaningfully attempt to

01:13:39.340 stop them. And for the Christian community of Lebanon, they seem to be saying, and I talked

01:13:52.840 to a handful of Christian Lebanese leaders, not enough to really say definitively what the whole

01:13:59.460 spectrum of opinion is. But they're not unified. Oh, no. And never have been. Right. Like

01:14:06.640 the Jews and the Kurds, like there's no one central view. Right. So. But. But they've gone 1.00

01:14:17.920 from, oh, my gosh, we don't want an Israeli invasion. There'll be a lot of useless slaughter 1.00

01:14:21.360 to saying, well, if it gets rid of Hezbollah, that's the only way to save Lebanon. 0.93

01:14:26.460 The Lebanese currency is functionally gone. People pay for things in supermarkets now with the U.S. dollar. If it weren't for the Hezbollah power in parliament, Lebanon probably would have dollarized a year ago. So there is a real debate about how does Lebanon have a future with Hezbollah inside its borders? 0.71

01:14:52.080 Yeah, public opinion in Lebanon is remarkable at the moment. It has shifted in a way that I think a lot of people 20 years ago would never have believed, that now more and more Lebanese are openly feel bold enough to say that Hezbollah is the proximate problem that must be dealt with and that actually, since that's the case and since their corrupt political leadership and weak political leadership and utterly implicated political leadership aren't able to do it, well, okay. 0.79

01:15:22.080 Israel's going to do it. Now, obviously, they also at the same time don't like it. I mean, 0.91

01:15:25.840 they can both understand that it's something that it makes sense that it's happening and also not

01:15:30.900 like it. They don't like having to evacuate from their homes. They don't like the fact that the

01:15:35.980 IDF tells the Christians of Tyre, the city on the coast, you got to go. They know what that means, 0.96

01:15:41.700 especially as an increasingly aggressive Israel is prosecuting this buffer zone security doctrine 0.78

01:15:49.980 where they're perfectly happy to lay waste to huge tracts of territory on the other side of 0.53

01:15:55.820 their borders, both north and south, in order to prevent anything like the 7th of October ever

01:16:02.100 happening again. So I don't, by any stretch of the imagination, I'm not saying that the Lebanese 1.00

01:16:07.440 are jingoistically supportive of Israel's moves there, but there is a kind of exhausted realism 0.91

01:16:14.120 now, that they just realize that the Hezbollah thing has been a problem, that Hezbollah has

01:16:20.380 been a cancer in the body politic of Lebanon, and that the ideology of resistance that has 0.63

01:16:26.420 been sort of propagated by Iran, aided and abetted globally by an increasingly deranged

01:16:33.060 leftist kind of ally movement, and ironically, which means in the West, never before have

01:16:42.040 more people been anti-Zionist or never before have people been so openly contemptuous of Israel

01:16:48.820 and unwilling to see Israel's perspective, just as actually in the region, amazingly,

01:16:54.880 more and more people are willing to see that perspective because they have actually lived

01:16:59.780 the consequences of rather brainlessly holding on to a fever dream of ideologically pure resistance

01:17:07.580 for decades now. So it's a great irony. And going back to the question of Trump and Hezbollah and

01:17:13.740 Trump and Iran, I just want to be clear. When I said that Netanyahu and Trump are working together

01:17:18.640 to separate the two, as it were, files, that's only in the context of the Iranian deal that Trump

01:17:25.280 is trying to get. He knows that if Iran can get the Americans to agree to link its interests with

01:17:32.620 Hezbollah's interests, then that deal will forever be extremely shaky, given the fact that 0.95

01:17:37.740 Hezbollah will always spark some kind of conflict with Israel, giving the Iranians the opportunity

01:17:44.680 to say that the deal has been broken, the ceasefire or whatever has been broken. So we will 1.00

01:17:49.120 go back to pursuing nuclear ambitions or supporting our proxies or whatever. That's what I mean. But I

01:17:55.140 don't think that Donald Trump doesn't want Hezbollah to be destroyed. I think he does want 1.00

01:18:00.060 hezbollah to be destroyed for all the reasons you you said richard and by the way i think you're 0.96

01:18:05.080 phrasing exhausted realism is exactly right there has been such a tremendous change in middle eastern

01:18:13.000 christian thinking from a vaguely or not vaguely directly pro-palestinian perspective 20 25 years

01:18:23.680 ago to a studied neutrality five years ago to yeah i guess we got to let the israelis roll their

01:18:32.620 tanks through here and get rid of these invaders uh and you know it it was this is an old story

01:18:41.180 but i think it's important one night i i stayed at an israeli uh farm on literally on the lebanese

01:18:49.020 border and i said well your farm workers come in the morning can i talk to them without you around

01:18:55.740 and i just want to hear what they have to say because all the farm workers came from the

01:18:59.180 lebanese side of the border and the group the workers that had sorted themselves into two groups

01:19:05.100 christians and muslims and uh by the way this farm is now evacuated uh because of the rocket attacks

01:19:14.300 and uh the fields are overgrown and it'll take a long time to build it back but anyway

01:19:19.260 so the christian workers they said well didn't you see our village at night it's lit up uh we

01:19:26.060 we have no problem with the israelis they are culturally like us you know we can do business

01:19:32.380 with them and then the muslim group of workers whose villages were not lit up at night um

01:19:39.340 there are very few generators there and hezbollah did not supply them any power

01:19:44.380 um said yes we work for the israelis because it's the only people who pay us

01:19:50.220 but uh someday soon this land will be ours and we will be the masters of it and we will prosper from

01:19:58.060 it and these are two groups of workers working for the same farmer on the same land living

01:20:07.500 in villages half a mile apart and so but none of these people were sunni these were all shia

01:20:17.520 so my last question to them was where did your father and mother come from 0.72

01:20:24.360 and the answer was always syria or iraq they weren't in lebanon for more than a generation or

01:20:32.920 too. When people see the exit of Hezbollah in Lebanon, what they're talking about is the exit

01:20:41.660 of this entire immigration of people who share a different values and different outlook and are 0.64

01:20:49.780 much more ideological than the people who were native there before. Although I would just want 0.98

01:20:57.100 to make sure that everyone understands that surely you're not saying that the Shia of

01:21:02.000 southern Lebanon are new arrivals in Lebanon. That would not be true at all.

01:21:06.760 Of the farmers and such like.

01:21:10.800 Yes. The farm workers that I talked to. Right. And this is years ago. And this is, you know,

01:21:15.760 a dozen maybe. Right. Weirdly, when when Iran, you know, back in the whenever 16th century decided

01:21:22.960 to be Shia, they had to import clerics from southern Lebanon in order to, you know, more 0.59

01:21:29.140 less forcibly convert the largely sunni population of iran to shia islam so lebanon and iran have

01:21:34.740 been linked together very closely and iraq you know parts of iraq where the shia are a majority

01:21:39.620 for many centuries you know so a reminder to everyone listening that this story is really old

01:21:45.540 it's just the latest chapter and a really old story but i also want to make it clear that what

01:21:49.780 i said about that exhausted realism lebanon he went and stayed at mocter al-sadr's house

01:21:56.260 in carbon exactly and now i also want to make it clear that even though there is a kind of

01:22:02.180 exhausted realism going on you know in the in the in the region which may be more inclined to see

01:22:08.340 israel's uh security actions as a rational response to certain things and no longer just

01:22:17.780 demonize israel that can happen that can be true while at the same time people are extremely angry

01:22:25.300 with Israel on other fronts. The ongoing problem in the West Bank, particularly Area C, but not

01:22:31.660 only Area C, the quote-unquote settler terrorism problem, which is a real problem, which is supported

01:22:37.420 by the right-wing people who are in power in Israel because they are pursuing a policy which

01:22:45.280 slowly but surely will annex Area C, i.e. the majority of the West Bank. That is true.

01:22:50.440 You know, people know this is happening. They may be less inclined than they were before to see Jews and Israelis and whatever as monsters or as superhuman demons. They might be more on the ground than they used to be, but they can still be really annoyed that in Israel itself, its politics, as it becomes increasingly right wing, largely, but not wholly in response to the 7th of October attacks, which were obviously horrible. 0.76

01:23:15.760 They can see that Israel itself is becoming more ideologically committed, often not very realistic, not pragmatic. What does Israel really think it's going to achieve? Does it really think it's going to wish away all of those millions and millions of Arab Palestinians who live in the West Bank and even in Gaza?

01:23:34.600 I don't think they're going to be able to achieve that. But at the moment, there seems to be no realist policy kind of development going on in Israel, like an actual idea of what policy are we working to achieve here?

01:23:51.240 How are we going to create a political solution alongside this military activity that we're

01:23:59.840 ferociously prosecuting?

01:24:02.140 You know, politics, I mean, war is politics by other means, as the man once said, you

01:24:07.960 know, and if you have no political solution in mind, then you're just fighting, like there's

01:24:14.900 no end.

01:24:16.120 You have to think, I want to achieve something.

01:24:18.980 Oh, I can only achieve it using force.

01:24:20.780 OK, I'll use force then. But what is it you're seeking to achieve? I don't think at the moment, perhaps apart from wanting to be reelected or staying out of jail or whatever, I don't think the Israeli government at the moment has an answer to that question. Arabs aren't stupid. They see that. It annoys them, annoys the hell out of them, especially since it has resulted in many tens of thousands of of Arabs dying.

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01:25:16.400 Yeah, I mean, the one way to guarantee a war with a democracy is to attack it and to kill a lot of civilians.

01:25:23.320 So I think when historians write the story of this time in the Middle East, 0.91

01:25:28.460 they will see October 7th as a profound miscalculation by Iran.

01:25:33.840 And the debate will be, is this something that Hamas did without?

01:25:39.160 something that it did specifically at the direction of iran because it to use a phrase

01:25:48.640 from another war and another enemy it woke a sleeping giant israel political will to go back

01:25:55.980 into gaza would not be there without october 7th and if you look back at 17th century american

01:26:04.980 history it was these indian massacres of whites that provoked tremendous military responses

01:26:14.220 and pushing back the people of the of the indian peoples the native americans what

01:26:22.000 what brits used to call red americans or red indians further back west

01:26:27.360 it was and it was a gradual coarsening of relations and a lack of sympathy

01:26:35.640 uh for those because of those attacks right so the trail of tears did not cause a political

01:26:43.100 pushback in the 19th century america because of the decades of of attacks massacres some

01:26:52.480 exaggerated by propaganda that occurred.

01:26:56.960 And October 7th had a similar effect on Israel.

01:27:00.820 The idea that many people who would not have voted Likud

01:27:03.880 suddenly said, well, these are the crazy people who will actually defend us.

01:27:08.620 And so no other response was really possible. 0.76

01:27:11.720 And the fact that Iran couldn't see

01:27:15.140 that the one way to galvanize the Jewish democracy 0.55

01:27:19.140 was to attack it.

01:27:20.140 and this may turn out to be an enormous miscalculation uh guys we've got five minutes

01:27:28.320 left uh before we we get into the last five minutes i i want to blow your trumpet and our

01:27:34.340 own in the process just to say i do not think you will see this quality of conversation about this

01:27:40.220 issue with this level of depth anywhere in the world mainstream media new media is just incredible

01:27:46.500 having you here to talk about all this stuff and by the way to have the principles and courage to

01:27:52.180 disagree when you disagree and to agree when you agree and to do that all with civility and the

01:27:57.620 the level of just uh you know beautiful conversation that we've had so thank you for being here uh

01:28:02.740 people will be loving this no doubt um richard the only thing i want to ask you is you say lots of

01:28:09.300 things as you always do where i go oh my god that's incredibly well stated but when i try and

01:28:13.700 and put them all together i don't quite get it because your belief is trump is going to have to

01:28:20.020 escalate while also you've described how difficult militarily that would be while also saying this

01:28:27.300 will be seen as a huge miscalculation by iran while also saying trump thinks he can get this

01:28:33.020 done by august and i'm just thinking i don't think he is going to get it done by august and if the

01:28:37.840 americans do go in it's going to be i don't know what the final result will be but it will be a

01:28:43.000 bloody thing as i think everybody would say yourself included how like i i don't see this

01:28:50.980 going well from what you're describing for the united states and for israel now iran may take

01:28:56.580 a lot of damage in the process but i come back to the point i've made at the very beginning it seems

01:29:01.880 to me that as you said yourself the the peace isn't coming because they don't want it and they

01:29:07.160 can maintain the current situation long enough that electorally this becomes an albatross around

01:29:13.160 the neck of whoever is in charge when it's still going on well that's right there's two clocks

01:29:17.960 ticking one in washington one in tehran the iranians are betting that the alarm clock in

01:29:23.080 washington goes off first that the world cup the 250th celebrations uh the declining poll numbers

01:29:31.640 of the republican party the declining poll numbers of the president the fear of the midterms

01:29:36.280 eventually cuts in their favor and they survive on the terms in which they want to survive

01:29:41.320 the trump loyalists are betting that the alarm clock goes off in tehran first that they're

01:29:48.280 shutting in oil wells they run out of storage capacity they can't make any more money the

01:29:54.360 u.s treasury is doing a fantastic job locking up their resources at banks around the world

01:30:00.120 and cutting them off from customers and the U.S. Navy is cutting down their

01:30:05.620 shadow fleet as is the Indian Navy and a few other allies and so which alarm

01:30:10.620 clock goes off first who loses and I think predicting the outcome and saying

01:30:16.380 someone this person is this side is definitely gonna win or this side is

01:30:20.040 ever gonna win I don't think that's possible at this stage I think what what

01:30:25.280 I was trying to say about the military difficulty is that a ground invasion

01:30:28.520 would not just be politically impossible,

01:30:31.900 but it'd be militarily unthinkable. 1.00

01:30:34.860 This is the reason why the last successful invasion of Iran

01:30:37.620 was Alexander the Great, right?

01:30:40.020 These are a tenacious, intelligent people

01:30:45.520 who've got, for themselves, very fortunate geography. 1.00

01:30:50.860 And even the ethnic minorities in Iran

01:30:54.560 do not necessarily want Iran to be broken up into pieces.

01:30:58.440 so they may rally to the mullah's side and the mullahs know all this um on the other hand

01:31:05.000 the mullah's interpretation of shia islam is distasteful to many you see stories in the

01:31:10.680 iranian language press that mosques are being closed because the the prayers uh the the preaching

01:31:17.720 at juma prayers on fridays are not friendly to the regime um and so you know both alarm clocks

01:31:28.940 are ticking and to say either one is a sure bet i think would be bad analysis

01:31:34.620 that's yeah i know i know how it feels francis doesn't it you just feel like

01:31:44.260 that's the middle east for you no am i wrong no well i mean no you're not wrong but i i you know

01:31:54.300 it's interesting i don't know i i um i think at the moment it's safer to be pessimistic and

01:32:02.380 because you know i did actually feel to my shame a bit optimistic in february and i thought that

01:32:09.080 a very malign actor. And my heart in this sort of fight is with the Middle East. And I just see

01:32:18.920 Iran as having had on balance the worst record in terms of destabilizing the Middle East, 1.00

01:32:26.020 killing people, polluting their brains by brainwashing them, making it more and more 1.00

01:32:31.320 a sectarian hellhole. So they're, for me, they've always been the proximate evil that needed to be 1.00

01:32:39.220 dealt with until you could get progressively close to solving the other problems. So I did

01:32:45.000 allow myself to feel optimistic in February, and now I feel like, you know, a bit mugged by reality

01:32:51.100 that the United States once again proves its incredible capacity militarily to not achieve

01:32:58.840 political aims. Like it's just a remarkable record of not being able to achieve political aims,

01:33:06.720 despite this incredible technologically superior force, just unimaginable. America remains

01:33:13.760 so powerful at that level, but it does not translate into political achievements on the

01:33:20.700 ground again and again. And that's a great shame. It's a shame for our allies. It's a shame for the

01:33:26.240 people of the Middle East. That's where I feel at the moment. But I would love to be proved wrong. 0.97

01:33:31.980 Well, our guest on Friday's, Richard, I'm so sorry, we're out of time. I was just going to

01:33:38.320 say before we wrap up that our guest on Friday's episode is going to be Robert Pape, who would

01:33:43.920 argue this is all because there's an escalation trap that the United States has played itself

01:33:48.260 into. We don't have time, unfortunately, to adjudicate that tonight. But tune in on Friday.

01:33:54.000 we'll talk to robert again to get his perspective gentlemen i think we francis and i thank you both

01:34:00.000 uh for the incredible insights and contributions and we look forward to having you both on again

01:34:05.360 collectively separately and in every other way uh thank you so much thank you for watching

01:34:10.000 and listening uh and it's been a great pleasure having you here thank you thanks guys

TRIGGERnometry - June 09, 2026

Iran Shoots Down US Helicopter - Iran War Update with Richard Miniter and Thomas Small

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