In this special edition of Trigonometry, host Francis Pouliot is joined by Richard Minniter, an investigative journalist based in D.C., and author of numerous bestsellers, and co-host of the Disputed Podcast with Amon Deen, to discuss Iran and the Middle East, including the recent shooting down of a U.S. helicopter by an Iranian drone.
00:08:28.000I 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.
00:08:38.780There are cynics who think, well, Trump will just take a deal, any deal just to get out of it.
00:08:43.640That is a misreading of the president that I don't think is the reality.
00:08:49.160Richard, may I jump in very briefly just to test what you're saying?
00:08:52.840If 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?
00:09:07.820That's exactly what the critics of the president say, what you just said.
00:09:11.360Right. I I think that they are wrong because the usual groups are exerting their usual pressure.
00:09:18.140But does Trump feel pressure? It doesn't appear that he does.
00:09:22.840a man under pressure would do things differently than he's doing at the moment
00:09:27.420a man under pressure would either escalate in the hopes that that might somehow work
00:09:31.560or urgently take any deal we don't see either one of those things happening
00:09:36.600what amazes me about observers of president trump is they never go and read his three books
00:09:41.900especially the art of the deal if he was under pressure he would be acting in the ways that he
00:09:48.760would outline how to get out of bad deals in the art of the deal instead he still thinks that he
00:09:54.820has all of the important cards and he does there are things that his critics don't seem to be able
00:10:00.840to imagine which are obvious next steps here's two of them one start sinking the shadow fleet
00:10:06.820instead of interdicting them and chasing them around the world just torpedo them and let them
00:10:10.840sink in the middle of long cold dark oceans um iran will immediately notice that because that
00:10:17.360If they can't turn crude into cash, they can't keep paying off their internal constituencies and stay in power.
00:10:25.680The 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.
00:10:36.680Instead, you will pay it into a fund the U.S. will control and hold in escrow for the rebuilding of Iran after this unpleasantness.
00:10:42.840If 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.
00:10:55.180Also, 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.
00:11:09.640that's the little bit of western Iran that borders the southwest of Iraq so
00:11:16.000they're becoming a little more sophisticated in trying to connect with
00:11:19.600Iranian opinion there are various points of leverage the Trump can escalate from
00:11:24.340here he thinks he has until the end of the summer or certainly he's acting like
00:11:28.360he has to the end of the summer I'm not a mind reader and he might right I'm
00:11:33.460gonna level with you I'm not a gamer even though I look like one I'm not gonna
00:11:36.960pretend i've been grinding through rpgs between recordings or that i have strong opinions about
00:11:42.000which final fantasy was the best one i think it's japanese and i think there's a sword that's
00:11:46.880genuinely everything i know but our social media guys showed me this app and i genuinely thought
00:11:51.840that's quite clever it's called snaxy basically game publishers need new players and they're
00:11:56.960willing to pay to get them snaxy just passes that money onto you you play games you were probably
00:12:02.640going to play anyway you own coins and you cash them out for real rewards paypal amazon netflix
00:12:08.960gift cards if you prefer gaming credit you can redeem for playstation xbox steam and nintendo
00:12:14.740or cash out your ineva wallet i've got no idea what that means actual money not just points that
00:12:20.460expire it takes a few minutes to set up you open the app swipe through the game offers pick something
00:12:25.200that looks decent play it earn redeem that's the whole thing there's a sign up bonus worth up to
00:12:31.440ten dollars if you use our link which is in the description of this episode that's s n a k z y
00:12:39.520snacksy click the link in the description to get started and when you sign up use the code
00:12:45.200trigger pod that's t r i g g e r p o d to claim your ten dollar bonus
00:12:53.920and the app is mobile only so click the link from your phone not your laptop
00:13:01.440And, Thomas, the one thing that we always keep coming back to in this conflict is the Strait of Hormuz.
00:13:09.160Is 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?
00:13:19.220Oh, gosh, I wish I knew the answer to that question, Francis.
00:13:23.060I mean, I'm not a military expert, particularly.0.86
00:13:26.180At 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
00:13:44.440I would have thought that's a very straightforwardly obvious thing to do.0.99
00:13:49.080It did seem that that was on the cards. We saw the three aircraft carrier groups moving into
00:13:54.440the region. A lot of commando groups were moving in, American ones, including it seems based on
00:14:03.000things that have come out recently to Israel working together with the Israeli partners.
00:14:07.880The whole idea was going to be to take those very strategically key islands in the Persian Gulf
00:14:14.440and control it. That might have required some troops to land on the Iranian shore to project
00:14:23.280that power further into the mainland. Obviously, it wouldn't have been easy. It's extremely
00:14:31.980mountainous there. There are lots of valleys. The Iranians have prepared for a long time for
00:14:37.700that eventuality. So there would have been some casualties, of course. But it strikes me as that1.00
00:14:43.200was absolutely an obvious thing that should have happened. The fact that it didn't happen,
00:14:48.720that Iran was able to close the strait, it remains closed, really, is the thing that sort
00:14:54.280of stymies a lot of people truly to make sense of it. Unless, as some people say, the military
00:15:02.740apparatuses, the material was not in place, was not enough to take it sort of
00:15:13.180with confidence. Some people suggest that when those two American servicemen were rescued from
00:15:20.400Iran or early-ish on in the war, just before the ceasefire, that that spooked the president a
00:15:26.000little bit. The idea that maybe Americans would have been captured by the regime, who would have
00:15:31.360then been able to parade them in front of cameras, humiliating the Americans, humiliating the0.89
00:15:36.660president in a way eerily reminiscent of the sort of scenes that were seen after the Iranian
00:15:42.600Revolution, which brought, you know, some people say brought down Carter's chances of re-election
00:15:47.700and certainly sort of overshadowed his presidency in President Trump's mind, for sure, because even
00:15:55.300in the 80s, President Trump was very open about how humiliating all of that was for the Americans.
00:16:00.660So some people suggest that slightly spooked him. He realized just how bad it would be for him
00:16:06.700politically if American servicemen were brought in harm's way and possibly taking control of the0.64
00:16:12.180Persian Gulf enough to ensure that the Iranian regime can't close the strait would definitely
00:16:17.460have put too many American servicemen in harm's way. And that was a bridge too far for the0.84
00:16:21.860president. That's what I've heard. It's, you know, I don't really know. Right now, there does not seem
00:16:27.480to be any appetite for anything like the sort of military campaign that would be required to win
00:16:33.840back the strait. But we'll see this attack on the Apache helicopter has now, I think just like
00:16:41.300within the last 90 minutes. President Trump has tweeted on Truth Social that the United States
00:16:47.140must of necessity respond to this attack. What that will mean, I don't know. That may actually
00:16:53.320be a sign of what the attack was about. If, in fact, the Iranian regime did attack that helicopter
00:16:58.680with anything like intention, it may be because the Iranian regime is testing President Trump now
00:17:05.780to see how he will react. There's been a lot of back and forth in the last week between Israel
00:17:11.160in the regime, between Israel and Hezbollah. Trump, you know, on truth social, being quite
00:17:16.220anti-Israeli, telling Benjamin Netanyahu to hold back. Benjamin Netanyahu, it seems, ignoring that,
00:17:22.420instead attacking. But then perhaps behind the scenes, there's less truth to that than it seems.
00:17:27.280This might be political theatrics. Maybe Trump and Netanyahu are conspiring together in a good
00:17:33.540cop, bad cop kind of routine. Maybe the Iranian regime is trying to get a sense. Where is President0.71
00:17:39.420Trump really sort of standing. He makes a big sign about wanting a deal. He's been flattering
00:17:44.900the Supreme Leader. Now, Mujtaba Khamenei calling him a genius, calling him a man of courage,
00:17:50.680all of these things. Very strange language, given that two months ago, that's not the language he
00:17:55.200was using. I believe the language before was something like an animal who deserved to be
00:18:01.200utterly destroyed along with Iranian civilization. So the tune has changed. The desire for a deal is1.00
00:18:06.740clearly at the forefront of the president's mind maybe the iranian regime is trying to make sure
00:18:12.260that the president is you know is as irinic at the moment as he seems to be that's just a that's
00:18:19.600just a guess because the thing is thomas this crisis with the strait of hormuz it doesn't only
00:18:26.720affect iran it doesn't only affect the middle east it affects the entire global economy so this
00:18:32.840situation can't carry on indefinitely and Trump must know that and so must the Americans.
00:18:40.360Trump must know that. I think Richard probably can speak better to what might be going on in
00:18:47.000President Trump's mind. I find it to be almost impossible to make sense of much of what Trump
00:18:53.800does or thinks. I'm a little bit, I'm sure compared to Richard, a little bit less inclined to be
00:19:00.440generous to Trump. He doesn't seem to be anything like a strategic genius at all. I think it's all
00:19:08.600pretty ad hoc. I think it is just possible that President Trump may feel that the political
00:19:17.580consequences of liberating the Strait of Hormuz and, as it were, finishing the job, which the
00:19:24.340hawks within the American security establishment still wish to happen, which his allies in the
00:19:31.960region wish to happen, certainly Israel, but also in the Gulf. He may feel that the political
00:19:38.060consequences are just too costly to bear and that the world will adjust. It is obviously
00:19:45.640catastrophic to the global economy that the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for as long as it has
00:19:50.980been. It will not reopen probably all summer. The president is desperate that the World Cup
00:19:58.700in America and Canada and Mexico go without a hitch. Eamon, my co-host, knows that the
00:20:05.320intelligence chatter is that the Iranian regime has, under the surface, definitely threatened
00:20:11.320to attack players, whatever, to have some kind of terrorist campaign during the World Cup to
00:20:19.420humiliate America. I think Donald Trump is desperate for that not to happen, given the kind
00:20:24.400of guy he is. He comes from the world of entertainment. He does not want his show
00:20:27.940to be spoiled. I think he might be calculating that, though it is catastrophic, the world does
00:20:34.060adjust. Already, the world is adjusting. It will take some time. There will be a global recession
00:20:40.100for sure. It won't be easy. But if the Strait of Hormuz remains for some time, more or less within
00:20:48.040Iran's sphere of influence, devastating as that will be to the global economy in the short term,0.91
00:20:54.280to the regional Gulf and Arabian, not just economies, political economy in the long term.0.97
00:21:00.200Nonetheless, contingencies will play a role. Saudi Arabia is already trying to maximize
00:21:11.960its west coast along the Red Sea. Perhaps that will really change things. Syria
00:21:16.600is immediately gearing up to play a much more important regional hub role as supply lanes and
00:21:24.680trade routes shift in the face of this. Obviously, the Fujairah port, which the UAE
00:21:31.220has on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz, will be invested in more. Who knows?
00:21:39.460That's a long-winded answer to your question. I mean, we're in that place now where, frankly,
00:21:46.180nobody knows it this is it's a sort of weird time to be paying attention to the middle east because
00:21:51.940many scenarios which people like richard and me for a long time regarded as worst case scenarios
00:22:00.340have happened so it's now they've happened and you think oh okay what's what's what next it's hard to
00:22:07.060know. It's a very good point about worst case scenarios because if we're looking at what's
00:22:16.480happening in the Middle East, there doesn't seem to be an exit point at this moment. And that's a0.98
00:22:24.080real concern. I think the moment when you really get worried about a situation is where you can
00:22:29.760see no clear way out. Is that me being overly pessimistic or do you share that analysis, Thomas?
00:22:37.060I 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.
00:22:57.500Others, other people say, no, no, Donald Trump would never allow that to happen.
00:23:01.260So obviously it will not be as bad a deal as the JCPOA, which some people say wasn't even a bad deal.
00:23:06.060So, you know, this is there are so many differences of opinion on that question.
00:23:09.800So 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.
00:23:25.860I don't really see a way out at the moment.
00:23:29.020No, not one that doesn't include a resumption of ferocious hostilities.
00:23:35.740Richard, I want to first of all give you the floor to address a bunch of points.
00:38:50.660Let's take away the markets for Chinese consumer goods in Russia.0.76
00:38:56.500Let's not get involved in Ukraine, but let's make sure that China's main ally is, that is Russia,
00:39:06.040is significantly weakened by letting the war in Ukraine drag on every day, not just causing
00:39:14.060Russia blood and treasure, but diminishing the fearsome reputation of Vladimir Putin.
00:39:20.620And so there is a grand global strategy here that is all directed at China. There's a reason why0.67
00:39:28.700remote Pacific Island bases that the U.S. has not used in World War II have been resurfaced,
00:39:34.740and navigation beacons have been reestablished and why training missions are occurring in the
00:39:40.700second island chain. There's a reason why U.S. naval forces are visiting Saipan and Guam for
00:39:47.860the first time in decades. I mean, senior personnel. There's a reason why training exercises are being
00:39:53.760planned with the Philippines. Also, look at the Straits of Malacca. So everyone talks about the0.82
00:39:58.640Strait of Hormuz. But Chinese oil also has to go through the Straits of Malacca between, you know,
00:40:05.040off the Malaysian coast. Well, both Malaya and Indonesia, which have not been U.S. allies in
00:40:10.660decades, now have made agreements in the past six months. So that, and India has moved from being a
00:40:19.880non-aligned nation, unofficially aligned with Russia in the Cold War, to becoming effectively
00:40:26.700a u.s ally and using its navy to stop the shadow fleet and reducing its refining of iranian oil
00:40:34.060so if you take iranian oil from iran and you trace it it now has to go past india which is now more
00:40:41.020or less in the u.s camp it has to thread its way through the straits of malacca past two new u.s
00:40:47.020allies and then enter waters in long-time u.s allies the philippines and so on to get uh to
00:40:53.980to where it's going. If you see it from that perspective, you understand why this was not a
00:41:00.240war of choice. This is why Iran was, why they're doing Iran now, why they did Venezuela, why the
00:41:07.380CIA and other U.S. interests are active in the Colombian election, why what's going on in Peru
00:41:13.820and Nicaragua makes sense, why certain bases being re-established, why there's so much diplomacy
00:41:19.660going on in the western pacific i mean connect all the dots because i guarantee you china has
00:41:27.060and putin has well that's a fascinating point richard and thomas it seems to me one of the
00:41:34.900things or one of the aspects of this conflict that we never talk about enough is lebanon and
00:41:41.120hezbollah can you explain to the viewers and the listeners why lebanon is so crucial to this
00:41:47.840particular conflict well because hezbollah is an extremely powerful less powerful now than it was
00:41:57.220five years ago but a very powerful iranian backed iranian financed iranian organized iranian inspired
00:42:05.200militia that has as its stated aim the you know the destruction of the state of israel in a way
00:42:12.360I mean, it couches that in the same kind of resistance narrative that all of Israel's enemies couches their activities in.
00:42:20.780But 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
00:42:32.300It is Iran's, it's the sort of pointed end of Iran's proxy network right at Israel.0.71
00:42:37.640And so that's why, I mean, there you go.
00:42:40.340So 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
00:42:56.880And 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
00:43:08.140Because the reality is, Thomas, and push back on this if you disagree with me, we cannot have peace in the Middle East.0.79
00:43:15.820We cannot have a ceasefire deal with Iran if we don't sort out the issue of Lebanon, but more pertinently, Hezbollah.0.90
00:43:24.300Well, 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,
00:43:32.440that's what I was referring to earlier about the good cop, bad cop routine, that it seems
00:43:37.280that Trump and Netanyahu are at daggers drawn now, but maybe that's more theatrics than we think.
00:43:44.520And what's actually happening is that having mistakenly, at the time that the ceasefire
00:43:51.120deal was being negotiated, kind of connected Lebanon and Hezbollah to an Iranian deal,
00:43:58.020which the israelis immediately said look we haven't agreed to this hezbollah is a separate
00:44:03.460issue and it's between us and them this has nothing to do with iran there should not be an
00:44:09.420iranian-backed proxy in in lebanon on our border we do not you know we do not need the permission
00:44:15.920of the government in tehran to attack the people who are attacking us etc so when the the ceasefire
00:44:22.920deal that came into effect in early april was being negotiated it seems from what i understand
00:44:27.740almost like accidentally, inadvertently, incompetently, the two issues were connected.
00:44:32.920And Iran could say, look, no progress on the Hezbollah front or any outbreak of hostilities
00:44:40.900between Israel and Hezbollah is a de facto violation of any ceasefire on our part. So we
00:44:46.120can start the war again on that side. So they're trying to disconnect those two files. So it's not
00:44:51.760that they have to be both solved at the same time. That is the Iranian position. They have to be
00:44:56.680solved at the same time. That is not the Israeli position, and it is really not the American0.80
00:45:02.640position either, not really. Everyone would love those two sort of situations to be disconnected.
00:45:09.860The question is, can Iran be compelled to agree to that disconnection? I think Israel's attack0.96
00:45:15.680over the weekend on Iran, to which Iran waved the white flag. It basically was like, okay,0.52
00:45:22.720okay, okay, okay, we won't fight back. They pretended that it was a great victory for
00:45:28.480themselves, of course, but it definitely was not. Israel made sure of that, only to be followed the0.96
00:45:34.840next day by this attack on the Apache helicopter. That's what I meant earlier about now they might
00:45:39.280be, they sort of tested Netanyahu. They realized, okay, he fought back. Will Trump fight back?
00:45:44.720Trump has said he's going to fight back. We wait to see if that's the case. But all of this is to
00:45:48.780some extent involved in the making of a deal so that and that deal must be disconnected from
00:45:54.460hezbollah because as with all things middle eastern the more you look into it the more
00:46:01.460complicated it becomes why do you think i have this long white beard i've lost my mind
00:46:06.680i thought it was your love of gandalf i actually what i want to respond a little bit to to what
00:46:15.840you said, Richard, earlier about the China thing. At the beginning of this conflict,
00:46:21.240Haviv Ghor, the Israeli journalist, published that piece, which made a splash, in which he
00:46:28.640laid out his analysis saying that, look, no one is noticing the truth, that this is all about China.
00:46:34.460It made a brief splash, and then it went underground, and that kind of narrative seemed
00:46:38.560to go away. In the Middle East, they did not like that narrative. They did not want people
00:46:44.840to be thinking that this was all about China, because it drew attention away from the fact
00:46:49.620that it should be about Iran. It should be about that actual genuine threat to all of those0.95
00:46:54.760countries. And that if it actually is just a larger global geopolitical game, where we're
00:47:01.860containing China or countering Chinese moves, then we're back into a Cold War world where
00:47:07.200everything is about the Soviet Union. And therefore, whole regions of the world can be
00:47:13.540laid waste in pursuit of that larger goal. It doesn't really matter if we spend 12 years
00:47:20.100destroying Vietnam. It doesn't matter because we're countering the Soviet Union in some way.0.80
00:47:25.920So the Gulf especially, but the Middle East more generally, would be very disturbed if it was the0.62
00:47:32.800case that this situation had been allowed to play out in this rather shambolic way in their backyard
00:47:39.820to further larger global, you know, objectives by the American administration.
00:48:05.560forget the China issue, just this war, you know, there were different people saying different
00:48:11.600things at the outset. But I think it's fair to say it's gone on a bit, right? I just think I
00:48:16.660think that's objectively a reasonable thing to say. I think at the time that it began,
00:48:21.060only Trump's critics were saying that it would take as long as it did. And all of his allies
00:48:25.760were saying, you know, I think the title of our Ted Cruz episode is we will win this end quickly.
00:48:31.160I 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
00:48:53.480well first on the on the question of how long the campaign was going to last despite what some
00:49:00.600people were saying middle eastern allies of the united states did not think that the campaign
00:49:05.640would be like quick they're not stupid they know what iran is they look across the gulf and they
00:49:12.920see that wall of mountains protecting the iranian plateau i mean iran is not a pushover nation so
00:49:21.800So the Arabian allies were not unaware of that.
00:49:27.000Now, sadly, the realities of democratic, I mean, electoral politics in the West means
00:49:32.620you have to, I don't know if you notice, guys, you got to promise people all sorts
00:49:36.180of stuff that's not in any way realistic all the time.
00:49:40.000And so on the one hand, people are saying, it'll be fast, it'll be fast.
00:49:43.400But the Middle Eastern allies knew it wouldn't be fast.
00:49:46.900I wondered at one point whether Donald Trump knew it wouldn't be fast.
00:49:50.440Now, 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?
00:50:03.120I 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?
00:50:13.440happy with the situation no and also that now we remember it's not correct to say that they were
00:50:18.640enthusiastic exactly you know the whole war that was launched on the 28th of february
00:50:24.880did sort of happen in a quite unexpected and chaotic way the the region was adjusting to
00:50:32.240decisions that the white house took when the protests were launched at the end of december
00:50:37.200early january and donald trump began to tweet those very heroic tweets that we all remember
00:50:42.880we're coming to your rescue go out protest now my understanding is that that was not pre-planned
00:50:49.520that response to those protests was not actually in a coordinated way planned and it moved forward
00:50:58.160some plans for resuming the aggression against iran which last june had had a first phase it
00:51:04.880forced it to move forward a few months that's my understanding it makes sense of what actually
00:51:10.640happened and the gulf allies were therefore wary of the drumbeat of war starting in january and
00:51:18.480then continuing into february that's why at the time you remember those reports saying things like
00:51:24.400you know the crown prince of saudi arabia mbs saying publicly you know we need to return to
00:51:30.160diplomacy but then calls to donald trump being like go for it go for it the truth is actually
00:51:36.320more in the middle. Those calls to Donald Trump were like, go for it if you have a plan. Is this
00:51:43.340going to work? Are you doing this properly? Because if you're not, I have to certainly in
00:51:49.600public say I'm against it because I don't want Iran to be attacking me. By the way, what is your
00:51:54.860plan, Mr. President? No description of that plan forthcoming. The Arab allies have been kept very
00:52:01.800much in the dark throughout this process. They are very fed up. My co-host Amon the other day
00:52:07.300revealed that in a private meeting with a very high-ranking Gulf minister, the Gulf minister
00:52:14.580actually confessed that it is becoming increasingly clear to him and to his colleagues that it would
00:52:20.380have been better if Kamala Harris had won the election. They are extremely disappointed in
00:52:26.980how Donald Trump has prosecuted this conflict and the trust levels on the Gulf side are very low at
00:52:33.580the moment. With Freedom Mobile plans you can enjoy worry-free wireless almost anywhere even
00:52:38.700places with not so worry-free names like Desolation Sound BC, Skeleton Lake Ontario or Dead Man's Bay
00:52:46.700Newfoundland. It's true you can go around Canada and around the world too with roaming access in
00:52:52.440over 120 destinations so you can even go to hell you know the one in norway go to just about anywhere
00:52:59.440with worry-free plans from freedom mobile conditions apply details at freedom mobile.ca
00:53:03.960very interesting richard i'm sure you have plenty to say so go for it
00:53:08.300i mean the gulf people are deeply unhappy for lots of objectively observable reasons
00:53:15.940first of all they have to make a lot of their water through desalinization which is a very
00:53:24.480energy intensive process desalination plants not only cost billions of dollars but they're gigantic0.99
00:53:31.000very easy for shahid drones to hit um and it doesn't take much to put a relatively small
00:53:40.260damage to send a shutter through the UAE or for Bahrain that they will be out of water there's
00:53:47.220no readily nearby place where they can import water and not and there are no existing pipelines
00:53:52.500to move it so we tend to focus on the other fluid which is oil which is how they make their money
00:54:00.180but without water they die and their desalinization plants are on the coast right as you'd expect
00:54:08.340so they're very easy to hit uh and even small strikes are red alert news across the gulf
00:54:19.020so they feel very vulnerable um however we see that they're starting to realize that they're
00:54:26.680going to have to get into this fight uae has decided in the last few weeks not just to leave
00:54:32.900OPAC, which at another point in time would be a giant headline. But also, and they're financing
00:54:40.800pipelines to go around the Strait of Hormuz into Oman to deliver their oil to tankers outside the0.51
00:54:50.440Strait that the Iranians can't shut off. That'll take months, if not a year, more to complete those
00:54:57.820pipelines. There's some temporary pipelines, which have very small volumes. But if you notice,
00:55:05.100other than leaving OPEC, they're starting to crack down on the immense amounts of Iranian money
00:55:11.520being held in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and starting to cooperate with SWIFT, with the U.S. Treasury,
00:55:19.360and others on seizing Iranian funds. So this means that while they tremble in fear for what
00:55:27.120Iran could do to their people also have taken a side, and it's not for peace. They understand0.51
00:55:33.700this war is going to be, if the Iranians want to fight a war, it's continue to fight a war,0.70
00:55:38.340which they seem to. It's going to be long. It's going to be a long slog. I should say a word0.76
00:55:45.940about geography here, because people have trouble mentally picturing Iran. If you were to pick
00:55:55.580iran up and drop it over the continental united states it would take most of the territory
00:56:02.120from the atlantic to the mississippi river it's a nation of 93 million people if you believe the
00:56:09.560latest census count which is maybe it's off three or four million one way or the other but it's
00:56:13.780it's it's a very large population and very as this map shows very mountainous territory
00:56:19.180So you have a Persian Gulf coast that is nearly waterless with no navigable rivers, letting seaborn traffic go significantly inland.
00:56:33.900Very little population on the coast and almost 100 miles before you get to anything green.
00:56:41.040And that only begins as the elevation steeply climbs.
00:56:44.400I 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.
00:56:59.820It's a fortress, they think, given to them by Almighty God.
00:57:03.840and if you tried to use ground forces first of all supplying them with water food ammunition
00:57:10.640and replacements would expose a hundred miles or more of logistical chains that would be perfect
00:57:17.520targets for artillery missiles and drones but once you got to the mountains you would be fighting
00:57:23.520inch by inch and the iranians are very good engineers at tunneling at bunkering
00:57:31.600that would be more of a slaughter than the U.S. taking the bunkered positions of the Japanese in
00:57:40.220the Pacific War. So it's just unthinkable. And they are surrounded to the north by their ally
00:57:50.000Russia, by Pakistan, which is sort of an ally of the United States, but sort of an ally of theirs.
00:57:56.420Bear in mind that the Iranian interest section, which is their version of an embassy,
00:58:00.660under current diplomatic law is inside the pakistan embassy so if you want a visa to go
00:58:06.440to iran if you have family there you go to the pakistan embassy to do it here in washington
00:58:10.580so the idea that pakistan would be all that helpful to the u.s is i mean it's a remarkable
00:58:18.660richard that you say that because you know it's you know pakistan has been mediating this deal0.92
00:58:23.240a really remarkable rather stupid part of this entire you know well charade they are not0.98
00:58:31.420trustworthy mediators whatsoever they have lots of skin in the game on all in all sorts of ways0.98
00:58:36.040there's tremendous corruption involved in this and so you know i don't i haven't read the art
00:58:42.360of the deal i have to admit i haven't read it but i am not seeing being played out in front of my
00:58:48.500eyes, a great deal maker making a great and beautiful deal. It does not seem like that to me.
00:58:56.240It seems like he's making it up as he goes along. Yes, but you have a professional class bias. You're
00:59:02.540expecting him to act like a professional that announces a big vision. I am part of the
00:59:07.360professional class. You don't know me. I do not have a professional class bias. I do have a human
00:59:12.180bias of rationality as the primary driving force of decision making. Now, maybe I don't
00:59:18.400Well, rationality is whether the means lead you to your stated goals.
00:59:25.660So 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.
00:59:34.860So we can't actually judge him by any standard of success because we don't know what he wants.
01:03:28.880I'm saying that they're not real estate developers.
01:03:32.440They don't see the world in those terms.
01:03:34.160You 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
01:03:50.340But 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
01:04:00.240yes it's a very different mentality but donald trump is not treating them like that's what they
01:04:06.460are it's it's beggars belief it's almost like he can't imagine that there could be people out there
01:04:12.160who when it comes to it aren't property developers right war is about real estate but it's not
01:04:20.440truly about real estate it involves real estate right uh right it's like the old one about the
01:04:27.260ham and eggs, right? The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed, right?
01:04:33.880It's an old Democratic Party saying. But anyway, look, the Iranians face incredible downsides from1.00
01:04:43.580making a deal and no real upside. Why should they? Right. The longer they make, in their minds,1.00
01:04:52.340they're making Netanyahu and Trump suffer. They believe Israeli and Western media that both of
01:04:59.380those leaders are hanging on by their fingernails. They see a number of events on the calendar,
01:05:04.940World Cup, just one of them, where they will exert outsized pressure. They know elections
01:05:10.820are coming in both countries. So they think time is on their side and they have the powerful
01:05:16.500position, why should they compromise and yield now? And the welfare of the people is simply not
01:05:25.000a concern at all. I mean, 70% of Iran suffers electricity and water shortages. The inflation
01:05:32.800rate is climbing towards 40% per month. Counterfeiting has become a real issue.
01:05:39.620Their global market for oil is disappearing, and their source of foreign capital is,
01:05:44.280By 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.
01:06:06.800so the question that trump faces in iran is ironically the same question he faces in fighting
01:06:14.320harvard in fighting the trade deals and so on how do you remove an entrenched elite that benefits
01:06:22.940from the current situation and thinks it has a right to rule forever when it is neglecting
01:06:28.940the people that it claims to speak for who are clearly suffering he has that problem in iran
01:06:35.260He has that problem in domestic politics, he has that problem in trade politics, he has that problem with China, and so on.
01:06:43.620How do you detach the meat from the host it lives on?
01:06:49.000From the parasite that is living off the body, right?
01:07:30.260i think but i may be wrong on this but i think trump prizes expediency over everything else
01:07:37.000i think that if he can get a deal done which will paper over the cracks and it will last
01:07:41.940three to five years and that he can dress that up as a win and then head over to the midterms
01:07:47.480wave wave the con wave the deal say peace in our time i think he would be very happy with that i
01:07:53.920I 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.
01:08:05.760I 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.
01:08:25.260I 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.
01:08:41.820Now, maybe time will tell that that whole side of the American foreign policy personnel
01:08:49.880who argued in terms of containment of Iran, engagement with Iran, and that's what underlay
01:08:56.960the JCPOA, and which sometimes pissed off our Arab allies in the region because they
01:09:04.920saw a Shia crescent being created and the Houthi takeover of Yemen and all that.0.96
01:09:10.080So 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
01:09:29.200But 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.
01:09:48.240Yes, he needs a quick win in order to win the midterms.
01:09:53.440He also cares about the stock market, which is a massive problem in this whole thing,
01:09:58.060because people in his family and certainly in his coterie have got very rich on and off
01:10:04.280over the course of this very wild time.0.99
01:10:06.720So he cares about those things, but I also think he does know that Hezbollah needs to0.93
01:10:11.980be destroyed if there is going to be anything like a well-governed Middle East.0.58
01:10:18.240Francis, 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
01:10:43.180They pose no threat whatsoever to Israel.
01:10:46.760They don't have the money to fund Hamas.
01:10:48.880They don't have the money to fund Hezbollah, whereas for Trump, the priority is obviously
01:11:20.780You have to look at what happened in Donald Trump's formative years.
01:11:25.100What were the events occurring when Donald Trump was in the early prime of his life?
01:11:31.700Hezbollah in the 1980s killed more Americans than any other terrorist group in history, with the exception of al Qaeda itself.
01:11:40.840so there is no there is a tendency in the biden and obama years to view hezbollah the kind of way0.80
01:11:49.600management deals with the union right like oh i hate the fact we have to deal with them
01:11:54.460but they're part of the landscape and they have a right to be here kind of we have to make the
01:11:59.600best deal we can it's not how donald trump sees it he i guarantee you that if you were asked him
01:12:08.060what happened on the achille laureau in 1985 he could tell you right i guarantee you he could
01:12:14.700tell you about the various terrorist strikes and uh u.s navy personnel who was murdered on a hijacked
01:12:21.980airplane uh loudly saying the our father in english by the way as he was killed by his
01:12:27.900captors in front of a plane load of people right this makes a deep impression on two important
01:12:33.340people, Donald Trump and Susie Wiles as chief of staff, who this was a living adult memory for
01:12:40.540them. They lived through this. So the idea that they've decided that they're going to just
01:12:45.060separate the way the State Department would like to do, Hezbollah from Iran and say, well,0.66
01:12:50.020we're going to have to live with Hezbollah. That's not the case. I mean, that's as plausible.
01:12:55.300And if you look at the White House's reaction to the seizure of the crusader castle just north of
01:13:03.180Latani River in Lebanon. You know what the reaction was? Nothing. No protest. No, oh,
01:13:11.780you've colored outside the lines. Just nothing. That took away a prime sniper and mortar position
01:13:18.340from Hezbollah because that was the high point on the far side of the river, right?0.91
01:13:25.580This, the fact that there are air raid warning signs now in Christian neighborhoods0.88
01:13:30.200in Beirut, they are prepared to go north. And I don't think Trump will meaningfully attempt to
01:13:39.340stop them. And for the Christian community of Lebanon, they seem to be saying, and I talked
01:13:52.840to a handful of Christian Lebanese leaders, not enough to really say definitively what the whole
01:13:59.460spectrum of opinion is. But they're not unified. Oh, no. And never have been. Right. Like
01:14:06.640the Jews and the Kurds, like there's no one central view. Right. So. But. But they've gone1.00
01:14:17.920from, oh, my gosh, we don't want an Israeli invasion. There'll be a lot of useless slaughter1.00
01:14:21.360to saying, well, if it gets rid of Hezbollah, that's the only way to save Lebanon.0.93
01:14:26.460The 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
01:14:52.080Yeah, 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
01:15:22.080Israel's going to do it. Now, obviously, they also at the same time don't like it. I mean,0.91
01:15:25.840they can both understand that it's something that it makes sense that it's happening and also not
01:15:30.900like it. They don't like having to evacuate from their homes. They don't like the fact that the
01:15:35.980IDF tells the Christians of Tyre, the city on the coast, you got to go. They know what that means,0.96
01:15:41.700especially as an increasingly aggressive Israel is prosecuting this buffer zone security doctrine0.78
01:15:49.980where they're perfectly happy to lay waste to huge tracts of territory on the other side of0.53
01:15:55.820their borders, both north and south, in order to prevent anything like the 7th of October ever
01:16:02.100happening again. So I don't, by any stretch of the imagination, I'm not saying that the Lebanese1.00
01:16:07.440are jingoistically supportive of Israel's moves there, but there is a kind of exhausted realism0.91
01:16:14.120now, that they just realize that the Hezbollah thing has been a problem, that Hezbollah has
01:16:20.380been a cancer in the body politic of Lebanon, and that the ideology of resistance that has0.63
01:16:26.420been sort of propagated by Iran, aided and abetted globally by an increasingly deranged
01:16:33.060leftist kind of ally movement, and ironically, which means in the West, never before have
01:16:42.040more people been anti-Zionist or never before have people been so openly contemptuous of Israel
01:16:48.820and unwilling to see Israel's perspective, just as actually in the region, amazingly,
01:16:54.880more and more people are willing to see that perspective because they have actually lived
01:16:59.780the consequences of rather brainlessly holding on to a fever dream of ideologically pure resistance
01:17:07.580for decades now. So it's a great irony. And going back to the question of Trump and Hezbollah and
01:17:13.740Trump and Iran, I just want to be clear. When I said that Netanyahu and Trump are working together
01:17:18.640to separate the two, as it were, files, that's only in the context of the Iranian deal that Trump
01:17:25.280is trying to get. He knows that if Iran can get the Americans to agree to link its interests with
01:17:32.620Hezbollah's interests, then that deal will forever be extremely shaky, given the fact that0.95
01:17:37.740Hezbollah will always spark some kind of conflict with Israel, giving the Iranians the opportunity
01:17:44.680to say that the deal has been broken, the ceasefire or whatever has been broken. So we will1.00
01:17:49.120go back to pursuing nuclear ambitions or supporting our proxies or whatever. That's what I mean. But I
01:17:55.140don't think that Donald Trump doesn't want Hezbollah to be destroyed. I think he does want1.00
01:18:00.060hezbollah to be destroyed for all the reasons you you said richard and by the way i think you're0.96
01:18:05.080phrasing exhausted realism is exactly right there has been such a tremendous change in middle eastern
01:18:13.000christian thinking from a vaguely or not vaguely directly pro-palestinian perspective 20 25 years
01:18:23.680ago to a studied neutrality five years ago to yeah i guess we got to let the israelis roll their
01:18:32.620tanks through here and get rid of these invaders uh and you know it it was this is an old story
01:18:41.180but i think it's important one night i i stayed at an israeli uh farm on literally on the lebanese
01:18:49.020border and i said well your farm workers come in the morning can i talk to them without you around
01:18:55.740and i just want to hear what they have to say because all the farm workers came from the
01:18:59.180lebanese side of the border and the group the workers that had sorted themselves into two groups
01:19:05.100christians and muslims and uh by the way this farm is now evacuated uh because of the rocket attacks
01:19:14.300and uh the fields are overgrown and it'll take a long time to build it back but anyway
01:19:19.260so the christian workers they said well didn't you see our village at night it's lit up uh we
01:19:26.060we have no problem with the israelis they are culturally like us you know we can do business
01:19:32.380with them and then the muslim group of workers whose villages were not lit up at night um
01:19:39.340there are very few generators there and hezbollah did not supply them any power
01:19:44.380um said yes we work for the israelis because it's the only people who pay us
01:19:50.220but uh someday soon this land will be ours and we will be the masters of it and we will prosper from
01:19:58.060it and these are two groups of workers working for the same farmer on the same land living
01:20:07.500in villages half a mile apart and so but none of these people were sunni these were all shia
01:20:17.520so my last question to them was where did your father and mother come from0.72
01:20:24.360and the answer was always syria or iraq they weren't in lebanon for more than a generation or
01:20:32.920too. When people see the exit of Hezbollah in Lebanon, what they're talking about is the exit
01:20:41.660of this entire immigration of people who share a different values and different outlook and are0.64
01:20:49.780much more ideological than the people who were native there before. Although I would just want0.98
01:20:57.100to make sure that everyone understands that surely you're not saying that the Shia of
01:21:02.000southern Lebanon are new arrivals in Lebanon. That would not be true at all.
01:21:10.800Yes. The farm workers that I talked to. Right. And this is years ago. And this is, you know,
01:21:15.760a dozen maybe. Right. Weirdly, when when Iran, you know, back in the whenever 16th century decided
01:21:22.960to be Shia, they had to import clerics from southern Lebanon in order to, you know, more0.59
01:21:29.140less forcibly convert the largely sunni population of iran to shia islam so lebanon and iran have
01:21:34.740been linked together very closely and iraq you know parts of iraq where the shia are a majority
01:21:39.620for many centuries you know so a reminder to everyone listening that this story is really old
01:21:45.540it's just the latest chapter and a really old story but i also want to make it clear that what
01:21:49.780i said about that exhausted realism lebanon he went and stayed at mocter al-sadr's house
01:21:56.260in carbon exactly and now i also want to make it clear that even though there is a kind of
01:22:02.180exhausted realism going on you know in the in the in the region which may be more inclined to see
01:22:08.340israel's uh security actions as a rational response to certain things and no longer just
01:22:17.780demonize israel that can happen that can be true while at the same time people are extremely angry
01:22:25.300with Israel on other fronts. The ongoing problem in the West Bank, particularly Area C, but not
01:22:31.660only Area C, the quote-unquote settler terrorism problem, which is a real problem, which is supported
01:22:37.420by the right-wing people who are in power in Israel because they are pursuing a policy which
01:22:45.280slowly but surely will annex Area C, i.e. the majority of the West Bank. That is true.
01:22:50.440You 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
01:23:15.760They 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?
01:23:34.600I 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?
01:23:51.240How are we going to create a political solution alongside this military activity that we're
01:24:16.120You have to think, I want to achieve something.
01:24:18.980Oh, I can only achieve it using force.
01:24:20.780OK, 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.
01:24:44.240With Freedom Mobile plans, you can enjoy worry-free wireless almost anywhere.
01:24:48.880Even places with not-so-worry-free names, like Desolation Sound, B.C., Skeleton Lake, Ontario, or Dead Man's Bay, Newfoundland.
01:24:58.460It's true, you can go around Canada and around the world, too, with roaming access in over 120 destinations.