Due South Episode 2: Meltdown in the Middle East

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, good evening, good afternoon, whenever and wherever you're listening to us from. This is Wilfrid Miner for Front.co welcoming you to the second episode of Dear South. Thank you to everyone who took time to listen to the first episode, share with us your feedback, share it with your friends, and just generally listen to it.

We really appreciate it. And thank you to everyone who's listening to episode two. We have decided to put this out on our weekly schedule, and we hope it becomes your go-to source for understanding what's happening in the global south. Now on to today's episode. So it's been about four weeks since the war in Iran started.

We're closer to the end of the fourth week than the start of the fourth week. And while a lot of the conversation is focused on the potential of a peace deal, there is a lot of concern that the Americans and the Iranians are very far apart on what it will actually take to achieve peace in the region.

Before I came on, I read two things that I have to talk about. One, the Iranians rejecting President Trump's 15-point peace proposal. And two, President Trump posting on Truth Social, and I'll quote him here. The Iranian negotiators are very different and strange.

They are begging us to make a deal, which they should be doing, since they have been militarily obliterated with zero chance of a comeback, and yet they publicly state that they are only looking at our proposal. Wrong. And wrong is written in trademark President Trump style. All caps, multiple exclamation marks.

They better get serious soon before it is too late, because once that happens, there is no turning back, and it won't be pretty. Now, this is a classic Trump tactic ripped straight from the pages of the book The Art of the Deal, where he uses public pressure to get the kind of deal he wants. Specifically, he used that to great effect in real estate deals.

But there's a question about whether that works equally as well when it comes to geopolitics. And that's because of something known as the private information problem.

It's a concept in the social sciences, specifically when it comes to crisis negotiations, where one of the main reasons why countries go to war, even if the wars are incredibly expensive, is because each side has information that the other cannot fully observe, either about its military strength, its willingness to fight or its internal constraints.

And there's a tendency, especially when countries have as acrimonious a relationship as America and Iran, to exaggerate or misrepresent the private information so that your adversary has a misunderstanding about your capabilities and is not fully informed about just how far you can go.

One of the biggest examples of this in the in the current war that's going on is the protests that were expected to happen immediately the strikes began or you know as close to immediately as possible.

There was a report in the New York Times that the head of Mossad had come to the conclusion that once the strikes began the Iranian public will rise up against the government, overthrew it without Israel and the U.S. having to pay to greater cost.

It's been four weeks of the war and apart from small pockets of protests reported by ACLED I haven't really seen and I don't think anyone has really seen any examples of a widespread protest movement that would topple a government and I say that as someone who has extensively covered protests all around the world from Mexico to Kenya, Madagascar, Nepal,

Basically everywhere.

So all of that's taken cumulatively led Danny Citrinowich, an unresident fellow of the Atlantic Council to write on Twitter that President Trump faces a narrowing set of choices as the fourth week of the war draws to a close. His first option is to recognize that negotiations are unlikely to yield a meaningful agreement.

Despite Washington's assumptions, Iranian leadership does not appear to view itself as having lost. And that will be supported by several intelligence assessments that, despite the assassinations, Iranian leadership is, for all intents and purposes, still intact. In fact, it may believe that it holds the upper hand.

And this will lead to two military paths for Washington. First, a limited ground operation, for example, aimed at taking Kag Island or the disputed islands near the Strait of Hormuz or direct strikes on Iranian infrastructure.

And I have to point out here that both options carry significant risks of escalation and are unlikely to produce a quick resolution to the war. Trump's second option is to push to end the conflict at almost any cost.

This could involve a unilateral declaration of an end to hostilities or a limited framework agreement focused narrowly on the Strait of Hormuz, post-owning the more difficult issues for later. This park introduces immediate risks, but it may be seen as a strategic retreat.

And from everything we know about him, President Trump does not seem a kind of person who would want to be seen as on the retreat. Now, all of this raises a much bigger question. Because if negotiations are stalling, and escalation carries massive risk… And what exactly are we looking at here?

Is this a war that is winding down or one that is just getting started? So to help us make sense of everything that we're witnessing, I spoke to Kina Raleigh.

She's the founder and CEO of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project or ACLED, which is one of the most widely used conflict data platforms in the world, tracking political violence and protest events in real time across dozens of countries.

She's also a professor of political violence and geography at the University of Sussex and someone whose work has shaped how governments, researchers and analysts understand modern conflict, not just in the Middle East, but also globally.

And if you're a regular watcher of war fronts, home fronts or basically any of our content, you know we use ACLED data extensively. In our conversation, we talk about why the war has lasted much longer than most people expected, why Iran may not see itself as losing, and why in the professor's own words, this may just be the beginning of the beginning.

We also talk about what's happening beneath the surface inside Iran, the likelihood of elite fragmentation, why popular protests are unlikely to bring down the regime, and what it would actually take for the system in Tehran to crack from within. And finally, we look ahead, not just at Iran, but at the rest of the world.

At where new conflicts call the march, which existing ones are most likely to escalate, and what this war in Iran tells us about the direction global conflict is heading in. Thank you so much for listening. This is Due South.