Western Standard - HANNAFORD： Putting the oil storage squeeze on Iran's revolutionary guard

00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show

00:00:21.040 of the Western Standard. It is Thursday, April 16. If all you have is the mainstream media,

00:00:27.600 you can be forgiven thinking that nothing about the U.S. action against Iran makes any sense.

00:00:33.120 The strategy of contradictory statements by President Trump, along with outrageous threats,

00:00:38.720 from which the President later retreats, it even has a name. Tacko! Trump always chickens out.

00:00:45.440 But what if there is a plan, and part of it depends on confusing the enemy?

00:00:50.320 Deception in war? It wouldn't be the first time. With me today is Joseph Varner, a senior fellow

00:00:56.240 of the McDonnell Laurier Institute, Center for North American Prosperity and Security,

00:01:02.160 a former Director of Policy to Canada's Minister of National Defense in the Harper days,

00:01:07.600 and a post-Argentine scholar at West Point's Modern War Institute. Mr. Varner, welcome to the show.

00:01:14.240 Great to be with you. Mr. Varner, first question. Do we know what's actually happening now on the

00:01:20.640 water in the Straits? Well, we know that no ships that are in Iranian ports are able to leave

00:01:30.080 and leave the Persian Gulf. And we know that no ships that are going to Iranian ports are going

00:01:35.920 to be able to go through the Straits to the Persian Gulf. So far, the Americans have 15 warships

00:01:44.240 that are set up to blockade the Sea of Oman,

00:01:50.340 and it seems that they're stopping and rerouting ships.

00:01:56.000 And for the Iranians, the loss of their export capacity

00:01:59.380 is about $13 billion per month.

00:02:02.540 So that will put heavy pressure on their economy,

00:02:07.940 likely collapse the reel,

00:02:09.480 and I think it'll be very hard in terms of foodstuffs and other goods to get in and out of

00:02:16.500 the country and what's also significant is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible

00:02:23.220 for about 40 percent of the country's GDP this will be a major hit in their pocketbook as well

00:02:29.540 are these the kind of people who can be influenced by hits in the pocketbook

00:02:34.360 They all seem to want to die gloriously.

00:02:38.380 Well, die gloriously rich. 0.74

00:02:40.600 They're enjoying the fact that they're running the regime,

00:02:44.180 and I do believe that the hardline elements are running the regime,

00:02:47.620 but they also profit very heavily from that.

00:02:52.000 And they use those profits for everything from their proxy militias

00:02:55.620 and to arm themselves to kind of grandize

00:03:01.240 and and have a good life for their leadership and their families and you'll see many many of the

00:03:07.800 senior leaders of the iranian revolutionary guard corps of the iranian elite their families live

00:03:14.120 outside the country in great luxury does israel know about that everyone knows about it but no

00:03:21.960 one talks about it yes that would seem to me a point of vulnerability for them that what is the

00:03:29.000 relationship like between the irg the revolutionary guard that is and the regular military services

00:03:37.080 which iran has the army navy and air force so during the revolution the the regular armed

00:03:43.880 forces were viewed as tools in the monarchy and were uh were distrusted so the revolutionary

00:03:51.400 elements uh which which were islamist elements uh created their revolutionary guard corps to enforce

00:03:58.280 their will both on the population and externally and so there's a deep distrust that goes back and

00:04:05.240 it's institutional between the iranian revolutionary guard corps and the armed forces

00:04:10.360 and there have been a lot of stories about how the uh regular military feels that it's been

00:04:17.640 starved of weapons and capabilities and goodies that have gone to the revolutionary guard corps

00:04:23.080 at their expense. So the weapons that the United States has been taking out in these 13,000

00:04:31.000 targeted airstrikes, mostly IRGC weaponry then? Well, the IRGC controls the bulk of the missiles

00:04:40.300 and drones. So those targets are largely what I would say are IRGC, some of the aerospace forces,

00:04:49.960 but a large portion of the Air Force was regular military.

00:04:55.180 Some of the Navy, the main Navy has been destroyed,

00:04:59.240 but the Revolutionary Guard Corps maintains a group of fast attack vessels.

00:05:04.920 Probably 60% of those are operational.

00:05:08.180 So it's a mixed bag.

00:05:11.720 But what we can say is that a large number of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders,

00:05:16.300 the IRGC, have been eliminated in Israeli and U.S. strikes. That's not the case among the regular

00:05:23.680 military. The senior leadership certainly has been taken out, but there are a lot less of their

00:05:29.540 lower-level, senior, middle, and lower-level commanders that have been taken out like the

00:05:36.560 Revolutionary Guard Corps. I'm just going to ask you to blue sky a little bit here, Joseph.

00:05:41.580 This sounds like the sort of suspicious relationship that existed between the SS and the Wehrmacht

00:05:49.560 in the 1930s and until the Second World War ended.

00:05:54.360 Is that a valid comparison?

00:05:56.720 And then the second question follows from it.

00:05:59.920 We don't really have an idea of how President Trump thinks this is going to end.

00:06:06.500 And is it possible that he is thinking that at some point the military is going to finish the job and destroy the IRGC? 0.53

00:06:16.680 So what I would say is you're absolutely right. 0.83

00:06:19.360 The relationship from what I understand between the Revolutionary Guard and the regular military is very much that SS relationship to the German army.

00:06:29.540 that same sort of relationship that the Roman legions had with the Praetorian Guard.

00:06:37.360 So there's not a lot of love lost between the two organizations.

00:06:41.980 And I think certainly that one of the options that the U.S. and Israel were hoping

00:06:46.600 would be to see that the military would step up and take out the Revolutionary Guard Corps

00:06:52.480 and the elements of the security apparatus that keep the government in power.

00:06:57.760 I think they also thought there'd be a bigger rising in the streets.

00:07:01.580 But, you know, there are a lot of questions around whether people have been armed to do that or not.

00:07:06.760 And the opposition is very diverse.

00:07:10.460 Well, at the start of the operation, end of February, I think it was,

00:07:15.780 President Trump indicated that this wasn't going to take long.

00:07:20.240 It was all about preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

00:07:23.980 Then it was to destroy Iran's military capabilities. 0.54

00:07:26.980 Then it was to end Iranian support for their proxies.

00:07:31.220 Then it was about regime change, and then it was about a negotiated settlement, which

00:07:34.860 of course didn't happen, which brings us to today's lock-aid of the Gulf of Hormuz.

00:07:43.020 Now, when you rattle off the headlines like that, it seems to be supporting the view that

00:07:49.320 Mr. Trump didn't have a plan, doesn't know what he's doing, and has obviously got himself

00:07:54.600 and there's a predicament that it's going to be hard to get out of honorably.

00:08:00.260 But six weeks later, it's not Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz,

00:08:03.900 it's the United States, and the Iranian regime is still defiant.

00:08:09.040 So was there ever a strategy that Trump was using?

00:08:16.760 So what I would say to that, Nigel, is that, you know,

00:08:19.660 militaries win wars when they achieve their strategic objectives,

00:08:22.840 and you just rattled them off. 0.67

00:08:24.600 you know, eliminating the Iranian nuclear capability, degrading their missile drone

00:08:31.360 forces, their air force, their Navy, cutting them off from their proxies, and regime change. 0.81

00:08:41.340 And so these are very high objectives. The Iranian objective was simply to survive, 0.82

00:08:50.900 was to endure, to maintain the regime and as much of their strategic capabilities as they could.

00:08:58.720 And so for Iran, they're fairly low-level goals as opposed to the U.S. and Israeli objectives in

00:09:06.880 the war. I think that there is a strategy. I think that the strategy, if you look at the targeting

00:09:13.700 and how the war has unfolded, there were very heavy hits early on on all the elements that the

00:09:20.140 Iranians had to make war and their senior leadership. And they continued to pummel that

00:09:26.440 leadership and nuclear scientists and others so that circumstances were ripe for regime change

00:09:35.600 if the opposition on the ground or the army or some other element of society decided to rise up.

00:09:41.020 and and when that didn't happen uh and ceasefire deal came uh or talks came they went to have a

00:09:50.260 ceasefire talk um i think to let the pressure off internationally and uh kind of cool things

00:09:57.340 hoping the iranians might come back to the table uh with with some real uh concrete um

00:10:04.420 offers including getting rid of their nuclear program the iranians completely stonewalled that

00:10:10.560 weren't interested and so now we have the united states shutting down uh traffic to iranian ports

00:10:18.880 which is effectively strangling their economy and i fully expect that we'll see the iranians get

00:10:25.520 pretty excited in the next few days uh as as their dollars dry up and and other commodities

00:10:32.400 And keep in mind, their refining capacity, in a matter of 13 to 14 days, their storage facilities for their oil and gas and stuff is going to be a chalk block, and they're going to have to shut down their refining capability.

00:10:51.660 And the significance of that is what?

00:10:54.040 means that their economy is going to tank and that's going to tank the money for the

00:10:59.200 Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime, and that's going to tank money for their proxy

00:11:03.820 militias and put a real crimp in the social life of the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

00:11:09.440 But meanwhile, I think it's fair to say that the Revolutionary Guard Corps would be the last

00:11:15.840 people to feel the economic pinch. Everybody else will be starving, but they'll still have

00:11:20.620 something so how do you actually bring those people literally to a close there's a lot of

00:11:30.680 stories about the revolution guard corps sending you know economic assets out of the country

00:11:35.940 sending their families out of the country to places like canada as a matter of fact

00:11:39.540 doing different things to try and protect themselves and their interests when you fragment

00:11:46.840 a regime and you fragment it at the top one of the things that you do is you make it very difficult

00:11:52.520 for people to choose between their own personal interests and their economic interests and those

00:11:58.360 of the regime and so by by hitting those revolutionary guard leaders in their pocket

00:12:04.360 books remember the regime in their pocket books you start to see fractures in the regime and and

00:12:10.920 And that leads to a situation where you might see regime change.

00:12:16.120 I think, you know, there are already stories that the Speaker has more clout than, who

00:12:22.160 is a former IRGC senior officer, than the President and the Foreign Minister.

00:12:28.920 You saw in the negotiations a delegation of about 60 Revolutionary Guard Corps and military

00:12:35.420 people showed up in in uh pakistan to try and get what they wanted through in the negotiations

00:12:43.580 you're seeing uh the irgc head tell the speaker uh that you know you shook hands with the americans

00:12:51.260 and and our supreme leader is not even buried yet so those cracks in the regime are starting

00:12:56.380 to occur and life is starting to get very difficult for people any idea how many irgc

00:13:03.580 members have their families safely hidden away in canada well there's supposed to be at least a

00:13:09.900 thousand irgc in canada and there's supposed to be a large number of of of elites that have have

00:13:17.020 come here and that's only through what you see in in open source reporting i would guess uh you're

00:13:24.540 seeing similar things in the united states uh you know they've just re removed a couple senior uh

00:13:31.260 family members of former irgc leaders and iranian leaders in the united states

00:13:39.100 so these people exist all over the place in britain you know france uh different western

00:13:44.940 countries so maybe the desperate drive to martyrdom isn't quite as extreme as we

00:13:50.460 have been led to believe well it just seems that uh people like to keep their options open

00:13:56.540 murdered them seems to be an optional extra for some some members of the elite so their story is

00:14:04.620 since monday have been that oil empty oil tankers are now heading for the u.s gulf coast uh to fill

00:14:13.820 up and uh you know they can't buy from iran so they're buying from america america isn't the

00:14:20.300 only place with oil for sale how big a deal is that is it going to solve any problems for the

00:14:27.500 americans well certainly makes the americans a fair fair chunk of change and it it does ease

00:14:35.020 the oil needs of their allies i mean china will get oil wherever it can and it was getting it

00:14:44.220 from venezuela we'll likely get it from russia uh venezuelan oil would would now be of interest and

00:14:52.140 and maybe mexican oil uh and certainly canadian oil if if if we could you know get around

00:14:59.260 ourselves and and actually get our oil and gas industry up and running at full tilt we would 0.99

00:15:05.980 have a lot to offer the world right now do you think the yanks would actually let the chinese 0.92

00:15:11.580 buy oil from venezuela i think the united states would do what it's in its natural interest right

00:15:18.060 now the americans have been quite clear that the chinese are hoarding oil and that they have not

00:15:25.100 been a good partner in in helping to deal with this crisis and we've seen you know two chinese

00:15:32.220 or a chinese tanker twice now try to enter uh into uh the blockade and turn around and retreat back

00:15:42.860 away and we saw the treasury secretary say that china wants its oil it's not getting it through

00:15:48.540 iran well let's just talk a little bit more about china how does the uh how does the rivalry between

00:15:58.620 China and the United States fit into this conflict with Iran? The idea was that we just

00:16:05.020 didn't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But of course, now that China's ability to buy oil

00:16:12.220 from Iran is impacted by the war, does that make the Chinese more hostile to the Americans,

00:16:22.060 or does it mean that they take the Americans more seriously now than they might have under

00:16:27.180 the former administration and recalibrate their their plans to reclaim taiwan or you know how

00:16:35.100 does what's the big picture here well i think that there's there's no doubt that china is is

00:16:41.900 a near peer competitor the united states and and russia and there's no doubt that both of them

00:16:46.700 would have liked to have disrupted uh u.s uh influence and power in the persian gulf and the

00:16:54.140 Gulf states, and they've tried. But the fact of the matter is, what China is coming to see,

00:17:01.940 and what I don't think that it likes very much, is that there's one country that can project power 0.78

00:17:07.280 anywhere in the world at any time and do it successfully in a way that the Russian and the

00:17:12.620 Chinese militaries can't, and that is the United States. And so I think the Chinese have now had a 0.58

00:17:20.120 little bit of pause to rethink their position. I don't suspect that the regime is as confident 0.98

00:17:26.940 as it was in Beijing. And you're continuing to see purges of its military leadership,

00:17:32.580 including the only elements that had any combat experience. And I think that is causing a little

00:17:37.740 bit of consternation in Beijing as well, and the widespread corruption through the military.

00:17:44.240 And you're seeing this purge of the Secretary Generals continue, but there may also be elements of the old Chinese Guard that are actually purging allies of the President to disrupt his concentration power.

00:18:02.080 So I think that the Chinese are finding themselves in a bit of a spot. 0.81

00:18:05.060 Well, indeed. Given that that is the case, let's say we take that theory and run with it. Does it 1.00

00:18:15.540 make sense for the Chinese to offer the Iranians sophisticated weaponry of the kind that possibly 0.72

00:18:24.980 could attack a U.S. carrier? Yeah, so the news reports are that the Chinese have offered

00:18:32.580 man portable uh air defense missiles to the iranians which which the iranians uh uh would

00:18:40.580 would use no you know way to try and defend themselves because their air defenses have failed

00:18:46.500 um and and there have been you know all kinds of reports on that and and the chinese have denied it

00:18:54.580 and i suspect that if they could disrupt the americans in some way that that would

00:18:59.540 make them kind of feel uh better in in beijing uh the same with the russians they both have provided

00:19:06.740 intelligence support and they probably provided some some uh other aid there were even reports

00:19:14.020 that two chinese uh freighters have been filled with precursor chemicals for the iranian missile

00:19:20.260 forces um i don't think that it's in their interest to do that in the way it's in the u.s

00:19:27.780 interest to arm taiwan and i think that the chinese would be very reluctant to you to

00:19:34.100 give the iranians what are called carrier kiss our killer missiles which are uh ballistic missiles

00:19:42.820 geared to attack ships at sea uh you know u.s aircraft carriers got 6 000 people on it 0.93

00:19:49.940 you whack a u.s aircraft carrier and kill 6 000 people we're no longer talking about a naval

00:19:55.940 blockade and be 52 bombers. Well, you wouldn't be, but then perhaps there are elements in China

00:20:08.120 that would say, this is it. We've been waiting for this day for a long time. Let's go for it.

00:20:14.200 I think the Chinese are enjoying the fact that U.S. attention is on the Middle East

00:20:18.240 and that U.S. military assets are being used up and drawn to the Middle East. And I think that if

00:20:24.620 you know, if you're in China, you're following that old rule of when your adversary makes a 0.58

00:20:29.620 mistake, let them, um, you know, the U S has, has dragged a lot of, of, uh, its military power out

00:20:37.940 of the Pacific. But I think that there are ways that the U S has compensated for that likely.

00:20:43.640 And, and it, it causes the Chinese planning capability, some, some problems. I mean, I think 0.63

00:20:49.780 the Chinese would, would like, uh, to, uh, see an end of this so they can get their oil and gas

00:20:57.200 flowing again. Um, and, and they seem to enjoy their ability to be a disruptor. I mean, poor 1.00

00:21:04.800 Vladimir Putin right now is, is, is trying to play a role in, in this war and he's finding himself

00:21:11.000 completely shoved off to the, to the edge of the stage, uh, where, where he's not drawing too much

00:21:16.640 attention so the best the russians can do is say well give us your enriched iranian uh your uranium

00:21:25.360 and we'll look after it for you that's the best that the russians have been able to do

00:21:32.720 how do we know who won when it's over well i think that that's the big issue and i think that

00:21:43.600 going with a ceasefire was probably the right thing to do politically and for optics

00:21:48.480 but it was the wrong thing to do militarily um it's given the iranians a chance to reposition

00:21:55.360 their missiles to dig out launchers to re-arm themselves and get ready for the next round and

00:22:00.880 there will be a next round i think it's inevitable at this stage unless their economy collapses and

00:22:07.600 we see the regime change from within having said that the the gravity for a u.s victory or an

00:22:16.000 israeli victory because of the objectives they set for themselves is very high the iranians

00:22:21.520 just have to survive they just have to endure so if we see at the end of this the iranians

00:22:28.720 in control the persian gulf and the straits four moves which can't be allowed to continue

00:22:34.400 you're going to see that the iranians come out of this much further ahead than they they would 0.93

00:22:41.840 have otherwise the challenge for the united states and israel is they need to really pull apart their 0.96

00:22:49.040 nuclear program and get rid of their their missiles and and and cut them off from the proxy

00:22:56.840 and militias and really establish a new regime.

00:23:01.400 And the regime that's in place now is hardline elements of the last regime.

00:23:06.200 So it's not a new regime.

00:23:07.800 They're not pragmatic thinkers or, or, uh, you know, uh, new, uh, new school

00:23:12.920 boys on the street.

00:23:14.280 Uh, these guys are hardcore members of the revolutionary card 0.96

00:23:17.480 core and they're, they're, uh, killers and butchers and, and, uh, thugs. 0.95

00:23:23.280 okay well when we and we must hope that the iranian military takes the opportunity if it

00:23:32.740 presents itself as being more reasonable people we are sadly out of time joseph varner thank you

00:23:40.040 very much for joining us and talking about the situation which really is very hard to talk about

00:23:46.240 who knows what what's going to happen but you've offered us some really some deep things to think

00:23:52.580 about. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you, sir. For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.

Western Standard - April 19, 2026

HANNAFORD： Putting the oil storage squeeze on Iran's revolutionary guard

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript