Middle East Roundtable: Hard Day for Bibi.

Hello and welcome to the Middle East round table at fronts.co. This is Evan Maloney. I am here with gentlemen. Wilfred W.: Wilfred Miner, Africa correspondent for fronts.co and… Wilfred W.: warfronts more broadly, gentlemen,…

And Kyle Moran,…

Staff writer here at Warfronts. Evan Moloney: It has been a busy weekend for the Middle East and a busy few days since. We have a return to strikes exchanged between Iran and the United States. We have imminent threats of Israeli movement northward in Lebanon.

We have a growing spat between the leaders of Israel and the United States that I'm sure we have lots to say about as time goes on. For all of that. Wilfrid, can you just kind of give us an overview of what the past few days have been and what the situation is?

So, it's definitely been a wild few days here. If you guys have not seen our most recent episode, over on Warfronts discussing the Lebanon front, highly recommend checking it out, more so than usual. This was truly an unusually beautiful episode, if I do say so myself.

In full disclosure, I was the author of that one, but the conversation between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu that took place over the Lebanon issue is truly one of the more incredible things that I've ever seen in covering geopolitics.

He told Netanyahu that he was effing crazy, that everybody hates you, and that everybody hates Israel because of all of this.

So, I mean, talk about saying the quiet part out loud. We have really seen just an unprecedented break in the relationship between the two of them.

As of early Wednesday morning, Eastern US time, we have had an Israeli strike just south of Beirut, but not in Beirut, and there have been Hezbollah ongoing rocket attacks into the north of the country as well.

So, I know we want to get to everything here, but let's start with what went down over the last 24 hours between Iran and the US and now drawing in Kuwait as well. So, for those who don't know, Keshum Island is located right by the Strait of Hormuz, right? It's kind of a long, thin island just off the Iranian coast. Not a huge population there.

So, it's a kind of an easier place to store missiles that are well within range of being able to strike targets that are trying to transit the strait from both sides and also then can reach into the rest of the Gulf. Now, it looks like Kuwait is the nation that kind of bore the brunt of this attack.

There's kind of a trope that's emerging whenever the US and Iran and Israel all start going to war with everybody; they all kind of punch Kuwait. It seems to be the trope.

Don't really know how that's going to work for Kuwait in the long term, but in the short term, it appears that despite the claims of the missiles having broken apart or been intercepted, Kuwait's international airport was struck directly. One person was killed.

I don't know if they call it Terminal One or Terminal A, but the terminal labelled as such has taken extensive damage. And it appears that the Iranian claim, which was that the missiles were trying to target exclusively a US air base there, does not appear to be accurate, or if it was, then missile debris went and then impacted this airport.

What do you make of the decision to target Kuwait for retaliation, two, the spillover and the collateral damage there, and then three, what this means for the risk of kind of going back into a more open conflict in the future.

And Kyle, I do want to ask you as well because I know you've in past episodes, which new listeners, if you're listening for the first time, we've had many of these discussions. So, go back and listen through the archive when you have time.

To Wilfford's point there, I have been a longtime believer that Iran's attacks on regional Gulf partners are not in its own interests, which I still maintain at this point. It simply has not delivered on any of what it set out to. So if we want to look at Lebanon as sort of a counterpoint, this is something that Iran was actually able to deliver on.

So they wanted to protect their allies in Hezbollah in the country and so they made a red line in negotiations. No, you must make sure that Israel backs down in Israel. They were able to deliver on some of this. When it comes to the strikes on the Gulf partners, this has not materialised any benefit to them.

Throughout the entire war, which went on for a month plus, there was continuous daily strikes from Iran onto the Gulf partners and the US and Israel were both continuing to just bomb relentlessly. This is in part due to the fact that Iran can't reach the United States and Israel has the best air defence systems in the region.

So part of the reason they're hitting Kuwait and the Amiradis in particular, but also many others, it's sort of a softer target, if you will. But other than just flexing muscle, it really hasn't materialised any benefit to them.

And something that I frequently bring up is their earlier strikes on Oman have actively undermined their own position in the region trying to set up their straight authority because they ostensibly need Oman on the same page, which is not particularly likely when they're in the middle of bombing them.

So, I don't see this working out very well for the Islamic Republic, unlike the situation with Lebanon. And so, credit where credit is due. You won't hear me say this very often. Buckle up. Full credit to the Islamic Republic on this. They were able to pull it off. But on the more tactical conventional side of things, not so much.

No, I understand why I am a relative Iran hawk here, but I call balls and strikes as I see them.

So they really drew a hard line on Lebanon which is as we all know a country I follow quite closely and they were able to pull off a pretty big I don't want to overstate it in terms of longevity here because these ceasefires have a tendency of collapsing pretty quickly but as of right now a pretty substantial achievement and I think that this may prove to

Be helpful to overall negotiations because it shows that the US is willing to play ball. On this front, it's very easy for Trump to call BB and say, "Actually, Iran's not going back guns blazing in Lebanon." So, it's not like a full concession, but in terms of right now, it shows the US is willing to play ball.

Yes, they will scale down the Israeli side of the campaign. If Iran is willing to engage. So I was encouraged overall by this entire development.

And while our conversation is on the Gulf States, I do want to bring in two additional pieces of reporting from the last few days. First one is by the Wall Street Journal. This came out on May 29th.

Essentially this was talking about the Emirates' role in the war thus and reporting that the Amiradi role had been much larger than disclosed initially a few weeks ago. Right.

So now the claim is: "The United Arab Emirates carried out dozens of air strikes against Iran beginning in the early days of the war and continuing through the day after the April ceasefire was announced." So a few weeks ago there were reports coming out about Saudi Arabia and the Emirates both having conducted more limited strikes, mostly retaliatory in

Nature, in the final few days of the war.

Evan Moloney: This now contradicts that and says no, the Emirates were playing along for a while now. We had talked during the height of the conflict about how the Emirates in particular was really receiving a very overwhelming response from Iran. But it's interesting to see in light of this new report.

So overall, my position has been that the United States will not lift its blockade as long until there's free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. I personally don't think Oman would join in on any Iranian toll system.

Oman is an outlier in terms of being the closest with Iran. They had their foreign minister in DC the day before the bomb started falling on February 28th trying to negotiate with the United States to convince them not to attack Iran. And even that still earned them a bombing campaign or missile strikes from the Islamic Republic.

But regardless of that, the threat that Trump issued to Oman, this didn't seem to me to be a gaffe because it seemed to me to be just a threat that if the Omani were to go along with such a tolling system, then the United States would be willing to take action against them.

And on this front, because of Iran's the Islamic Republic's actions earlier, I saw almost no downside from Washington's perspective. Because when you look at what the outcome would be at the absolute worst, Washington would be as hostile to Oman as the Islamic Republic was. They would have been bombed by both of them.

So I mean as of right now, they have been bombed by one but not the other. And if Trump took action against Oman, then it would just be levelling the playing field. At best, it would intimidate them and actually implement a cost to deal working with this straight authority because beforehand it was just pure profit.

It would have isolated them in the region if they went along with it. Sure, because the entire rest of the Gulf opposes such a move. Kyle Moran: But as we can see they haven't actually embraced it yet. I highly suspect concerns about that both mil kinetic and also non-kinetic. There's a lot of scene stuff that Washington can do as well with Oman.

So I highly suspect that's playing a pretty big role in that. But overall I don't see that impacting the US's thinking in terms of whether it should lift the blockade or not to rec before or after freedom of navigation is restored.

So just to be totally clear about what the position is, is this a pro-bombing Oman under certain circumstances argument?

I wouldn't say I'm pro-bombing.

I'm saying that it made sense from Washington's perspective that if they were to implement a threat of taking action there was essentially no downside in my perspective for this statement because if the United States engages Oman either through sanctions or full-out kinetic action if they were to recognise the Persian Gulf Strait Authority start implementing

These tolls that would simply create a cost barrier.

And I trust me, I certainly hope Oman does not join in on that.

So thinking about this whole situation in aggregate now obviously there has been some hope on all sides for a few weeks now as we've said there's kind of this ceasefire every couple of days might or

Might not be a thing there's been a real hope for a wind-down and understandably so looking at the situation now and I do want to go to both of you on this.

Do you assess that we are in a position where a wind-down is still possible in the foreseeable future or has this kind of cycle of escalation played out enough in the past few weeks that we should anticipate this kind of spiralling toward a return to conflict at least in the short term and

Kyle is who you first

So, the translation of ceasefire, there's a few different versions in both Arabic and Hebrew. The version we've been getting most frequently lately from both of them is a slight mistranslation. I believe it's coming across as you see I fire. So that's where a lot of this has been going wrong.

I think whether or not we're able to get a proper translation on this. This is something we'll have to consult the crystal ball on. I'm not holding my breath. I had some pretty high hopes towards the end of last week that the negotiations between Iran and the US were going somewhere. That those have since sort of tapered off.

I will say that the diplomacy between the US and Hezbollah and Lebanon with the whole Israel front going on there has been encouraging to me because it shows that the United States is willing to play ball. It shows that Donald Trump is willing to not just pursue a pure maximalist approach.

He's willing to reign in Netanyahu when needed is a highly subject to interpretive stance there, but that's not something we were seeing two weeks ago. It was pure maximalist positions. Kyle Moran: So this is something that I think may be read by those who want to deal in Iran as encouraging.

The problem being most of the people who are now in power now are not the people who are most likely to want a deal.

Those are all good points. The gulf between the two of them is unfortunately wide, but right now I honestly think if Iran wants to actually reach a deal with the United States, it has to be willing to make some concessions, granted, but I don't think that the terms would necessarily need to be insanely harsh.

So when it comes to the Strait of Hormuz, these agreements on paper, as long as Iran is not there, any deal reached on paper does not change the geography. A dozen IRGC dudes could set up shop at any point, regardless of what they agreed to on paper, with a few shot head drones and shut the whole thing down once again.

No agreement on paper is going to take that away from them. This has always been the case. This has been the case. Kyle Moran: It happened back in the 80s before drones, obviously, so they had to use mines, but they were able to cause huge issues for the whole area. The Strait of Hormuz had tons of issues going on there.

So overall, the situation I don't think once past that once you recognise the reality on the ground needs to be that complicated.

If Iran is willing to give up its nuclear programme, shall we say, and in return just is able to know that it can close the Strait of Hormuz relatively easily, which its own leadership has recognised as being on par with having a nuke. Then this de-incentivises the whole nuclear programme to begin with. Because where did this get them?

Kyle Moran: I mean, it got them a decade of sanctions, a crippled economy. The rial is completely worthless at this point. It's literally like a rounding error when it comes to international currencies. So, it hasn't delivered for them at all. And it hasn't provided security either.

So, even if they go guns blazing at this, they're still several years away at this point, most likely. I think the best estimates are two years. So they're not that close. And overall, it's just not nearly as effective as being able to just close the Strait of Hormuz as needed.

I mean, I just don't see any of that happening. I mean, he can pose what he will, but I mean, it's as unrealistic as the Iranian AI-generated propaganda that they've been posting over on X. Evan Moloney: Yes, they are. Kyle Moran: I don't know if you guys have seen this stuff. It's quite creative, shall we say? the Iranian side.

Wilfred W.: The Lego posts - it's some of the best use of social media during a war that I have seen and…

I didn't see any Lego ones. They've just been posting the most obscene stuff. They posted something about the Statue of Liberty being attacked by the Jesus Christ statue in Brazil, and…

They were like wrestling, and Jesus was punching Lady Liberty in the face. I wasn't a fan. I have not seen the Lego Warfronts live reactions. Evan Moloney: Wait, you're saying you have not seen the Lego videos? Evan Moloney: Maybe we need to do some kind of react thing for our force.co subscribers because they're something. Yeah, exactly.

I do just want to weigh in if you'll forgive me and give me the mic for a moment, and just kind of throw out what has seemed to me to be kind of an unspoken reality of this whole thing. Quite frankly, I don't buy the idea that the US has moved away from the objective of regime change.

Evan Moloney: That's something that the US has openly and publicly disavowed, which seems to me quite frankly to be for mostly political reasons, That is a toxic phrase in US politics and for good reason after everything we've seen with the war on terror and so on.

It does not seem to me that the terms of a peace that the US would be willing to accept are achievable through anything other than regime change at this stage. And regime change not necessarily meaning anything related to most but regime change in that the IRGC is now seeming to slowly but surely have taken over the Iranian government.

Evan Moloney: We saw some reports, unconfirmed, that Iranian President Massud Peskin had actually tried to hand in his resignation this past weekend, which was quickly denied or declined by the Supreme Leader who said, "No, get back in there.

Sorry, you have to." But Peskin's logic in that was basically to say the IRGC has taken over, there is no room left for a president like myself other than to rubber stamp their decisions, which I'm not willing to do. I'm not going to do it. Let me out right now. It doesn't seem like that's going to work for him.

And that's kind of a small, very sad conversation about what the president of Iran must be feeling. Unrelated to that, I don't understand…

Thank you. Evan Moloney: What the path is for the US to agree to any ceasefire that the IRGC would also agree to under the current terms.

Evan Moloney: I don't necessarily think that the US is envisioning its operations and its future in this area as a regime change war, but I don't believe that the idea of a ceasefire is compatible within Iran that is under this current leadership.

And that sets up a really difficult situation in my mind for the US because Iran is clearly working to buy time, If Iran really wanted a peace deal on its own merits and was looking to achieve that, it would be quite frankly, it would be done. Too, with if the US just wanted peace at all costs, that would be done.

Iran It seems to be playing for enough time that the rest of the world will accept kind of a new status quo in the region.

Kind of where each of you come in on that. But that's where it seems like we're going as I see it. 00:45:00

So just how much Mo Mustava is willing to do that remains a complete question mark because of how little we actually know about him. I will say that a bombing campaign that killed his wife and father is probably not the greatest first impression.

But overall, I think that if Iran and there is a faction within the government there that wants a deal because they recognise this blockade is doing serious harm to their economy. If they want to be anything other than a military first state in which the economy is just a complete joke where they have no allies, no friends, whatever.

They will need some sort of framework in which to work with the international community. I think that if Donald Trump is willing to make certain concessions on a few various issues, then that faction would be willing to play ball. So, I think it may ultimately just come down to where Mostafa falls on this.

Evan Moloney: And speaking of most of his role, I do want to bring up and Wilfred, I'm going to pivot to you with this report from Marco Rubio yesterday speaking at I believe a press conference essentially saying they've seen more movement from Mostafa in the last few days.

It seems like he's starting to become much more of an active player in Iranian decision-making. His decrees and his statements are kind of reaching out to the four corners a little more often than they had been. What do you make of that? And then what do you expect to see change, if Mostafa really does start to play a much larger decision-making role?

Wilfred W.: So, I remember a time in week two or three of this war when I don't remember which really tells you just how much Iran content we put out there, had a video saying 'Is Mostafa dead?' Cuz we seriously believed at the time that he was dead and was just being used as a figurehead for the IRGC to say whatever the f*** they wanted. Pardon my French.

So in a week, has anyone watched 'Weekend at Bernie's'? Sort of something like that. Wilfred W.: So the fact that we've gone from that to Mostafa being a lot more active, issuing a lot more decrees to me tells me whatever doctors he has, they are good enough to save someone who was basically on the brink of death, and you bring him back to power.

However, I don't think it will change much, as Kyle said, a bomb strike that kills his wife and his father is not the best first impression, and he has historically been aligned with the guards in Iran's power structure, correct me if I'm wrong, but he was involved in putting down a revolt following the 2009 election.

I'd have to check the year, but something along those lines. So, we already have an idea of what kind of leader Mostafa is going to be. We already have an idea of just how much influence the guards have and the moderate faction, the ones that want peace, how little influence they have. So I don't see Mostafa's reemergence as likely to change much.

It might change a few small nuances here and there with him being more in power than the guys in the IRGC. Everyone has their own little nuances that they like. But on a broader scale, I don't see it changing much. 00:55:00

Nabia Berry, the speaker of parliament, there was told Joseph that he was 200% certain that Hezbollah would not engage, and that lasted about 24 hours. Since then, the country has descended into yet another even worse war than the 2024 one, unfortunately. Israel has rolled into the south of Lebanon and has been progressively moving further north.

Donald Trump's post the other day was that there was an IDF brigade on the way to Beirut. The IDF denied that this is true, but honestly, that wouldn't entirely surprise me. They have been pursuing a pretty maximalist strategy in the Lebanese country. Over about a fifth of the country, I think more now is displaced.

It's a country of less than 6 million, and over a million people are displaced because of this.

Israel has issued massive evacuation orders throughout the south, throughout Tyre, which is the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth. They have issued massive evacuation orders across many parts of Beirut. There is simply nowhere for these people to go. And this is to my frustration immensely because none of this needed to happen.

As well as Hezbollah knew exactly what was going to happen if they engaged Israel, and they did so anyway. Which, much to my own chagrin, but Hezbollah does not necessarily consult the warfront team before making strategic decisions, apparently. But that's where we stand on the kinetic front at least.

And it is true that the warfront scene has not really received many communications from Hezbollah nor had we before that. They don't really talk to us. It's too bad.

But as we're seeing this Israeli move northward, where there's obviously this spectre of a much larger bombing campaign against the capital city of Beirut, we've also been seeing Israel move north of the Litani River, which has always been kind of this dividing line between where Israeli operations are kind of conceivable versus where they're not over the

Past 25 years.

The IDF is now moving toward I believe the Zerani River, which is about 10 km north on average. Do you anticipate further northward expansion at this point?

If that kind of patch of land between the two rivers can be secured, or do you believe that that will entail the broad scope of what the IDF wants to achieve in the ground?

As of right now, I think they're going to avoid further escalatory measures like that because first off, they've already taken a significant portion of the south of the Litani being much bigger than the more recent expansion north is more bold, shall we say, but it's a much smaller part of the country than the south as a whole.

So overall, I was concerned about both of those developments in terms of any long-term presence there. The defence minister, Israel Katz, has openly floated the Gaza-style security zone. The problem here being Israel has tried this before in Lebanon and it did not work well at all. They occupied the country for 18 years. They pulled out in 2000.

So I certainly have frustrations with the Israeli approach on Lebanon.

But the problem here being that by pushing Israel to respond, what is Israel to do? Because they tried working with the Lebanese government and then they've tried basically everything. They've done full occupation, they've done semi-occupation, they've done security buffer zone only, they've done negotiations, and none of it's really worked.

So overall, you just have to sort of wonder where does this all go? What is the solution here?

And let's pivot to the other headline that we've seen tangentially, pretty directly related to Lebanon in the last few days. This was a call between US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

During which time Trump apparently gave Netanyahu a real talking to, some of the quotes here reported by Axios, "What the f*** are you doing?" in reference to US strikes anticipated against Beirut.

I think you love it.

Really placing a lot of pressure on Netanyahu to back off the Hezbollah offensive to try and leave some room for Iranian negotiations to proceed without the risk of escalation in Lebanon. Quoting again, this time Trump speaking to Netanyahu, "You're f** crazy. You'd be in prison if it weren't for me. I'm saving your ass. Everybody hates you now.

Everybody hates Israel because of this."

So, not really what you expect from Donald Trump, 47th president, staunch Republican, very much an ally of the pro-Israeli American right, but some sentiments that we certainly heard from other analysts out there kind of reflected through Trump. What do you make of this?

And what do you make also of Trump's confirmation in a taped interview that I believe was released yesterday, where Trump was asked about this directly and said, "Yeah, no, I did say all that. I did call him crazy."

Yeah.

I had initially a few concerns that it would be about how credible the call was. However, there were a few signs to me that it was legitimate. So, first off, Netanyahu did not get anything from this call.

He looked pretty humiliated in the Israeli domestic scene and he was getting blasted by his domestic counterparts who were essentially accusing him of being a sellout to the Americans.

Kyle Moran: We always focus and the three of us, the international community focuses on US-Israel relationships so heavily from the American side of things without often paying attention to The Israeli side sees Netanyahu as an American sellout on this. They want to hardline the hardliners in the country which are a significant faction.

This is not some tiny fringe. Kyle Moran: This as a complete abdication of national security on the Lebanese front and are furious with him over this. So Netanyahu came out domestically looking worse not better. And you can see the reactions of I hate to bring him up but I have to here.

Mark Levin is a man so infamous for his all capital letter tweeting, shall we say, was once again engaged in all capital letter tweeting the other night talking about how this leak was a violation of federal law. These people were the hardline, very pro-Israel faction, very very upset about this.

So overall, I see it as more likely legitimate than not. 01:10:00

And I do want to bring in a few quotes over from the Israeli media as well and from the political scene because this really has generated a lot of backlash from the Israeli centre and right specifically when Netanyahu called off strikes that were supposed to go in on some of the familiar figures here we already know it's Ben Gvir, national security minister

And very hard-right leader, saying quote 'now is the time to do what is required and necessary to strike to unshackle our fighters and to restore security to the north'.

So kind of what you would expect from Ben Gvir, but quite a few other people who you wouldn't really expect to take this hard of a line.

Yair Lapid, for example, called for a protectorate state over essentially all of Lebanon in the aftermath of this. Reading off the Jerusalem Post here by the way, Moshe Ya'alon, who is part of Netanyahu's ruling coalition, quote 'we should have acted now, not now... but two weeks ago.

What is happening here is that we are exercising restraint, buying quiet, and in the end it blows up in our faces. We must not contain it. We need to destroy it', and Gadi Eisenkot, quote referred to this as 'a humiliating demand, one that is blatantly unreasonable'.

Netanyahu is quote 'the man... who preached morals to everyone about the basic need to be a prime minister and to know how to say no to the president of the United States'. And there's a number of other different quotes here kind of along the same lines.

What is it? Kyle Moran: I will see you. Evan Moloney: who really just a massive backlash against Netanyahu for his willingness to back off of air strikes here. Netanyahu has elections coming up, this is not an abstract concern.

And often times, we've seen over the broader course of history and these kind of militaristic strongman leaders that often the real political headwinds they run into don't necessarily come when an opposition party accuses them of having gone too far, but comes when the people who agree with them who kind of want to pursue the same military objectives accuse

Them of not going far enough and that becomes really pervasive.

So I suppose as we looked forward to these elections, especially as Trump kind of raises a spectrum of no, you would be in jail if it wasn't for me. Get you through elections. We're trying to get you out of your corruption cases, so on and so forth. Do you think that this meaningfully impacts Netanyahu's political prospects in the near future?

Yes, I do. Those quotes are all excellent stuff. Because it really shows a side of the equation that a lot of people don't necessarily get exposed to very frequently. But overall, this is a big development domestically.

And this gets to the whole idea of the Israeli opposition, because people have this idea that if Netanyahu goes right, everyone's going to be holding hands and there'll be peace in the Middle East and all of these great things. I'm not holding my breath on this.

The Israeli opposition on many levels, attitudinally and continues to attempt to outflank Netanyahu on security measures. Kyle Moran: So sometimes they will accuse him of being as either having lost the ball on stuff leading up to 107, but also on this stuff as just being too soft.

And so while this reading may come as a shock to some people, Netanyahu in Israeli politics is essentially a centre-right figure. And as the country continues to drift rightward, he's sort of becoming centrist even.

So, overall, I see this as potentially being a catalyst as being the downfall of Netanyahu because he bit off so much and he has done substantial damage to Hamas in Gaza, but Iran has not proven to be the decisive victory. He portrayed it as being likely to be. 01:15:00

And the Lebanon front is not going nearly to the degree he'd like it to. I don't see this going very well for him at all.

What's more shocking on the Middle East round table? Kyle Moran: Kyle gave huge credit to the Islamic Republic or Wilfred said he might end up missing Benjamin Netanyahu. Evan Moloney: big day for us. Wilfred W.: Things we never thought we'd say.

If we put this on YouTube, the comments would just be absolutely brutal, but people will miss Netanyahu when he's gone in terms of what is likely coming next is something I will cautiously warn our listeners. Let's see. Evan Moloney: And I do want to set up kind of a more abstract situation here.

And I know we like to avoid being deterministic, but let's play around in determinist land as we look to wind down the Middle East round table for today. Let's say that this war with Iran continues for a little while, but eventually the US troop presence diminishes in the area. Right? Kyle Moran: It's not only

One of the big sticking points that I really try to drill down on in my own coverage of my own research is the sheer expenditures involved in this massive movement of military equipment. Are such that once this deployment ends, it is very unlikely to restart.

There's not really a world in which upon billions of dollars that it costs to station these military assets in the Middle East, all of that is then moved back, which is a very expensive process in itself. And then it's just going to go back again, this flip-flopping across the Atlantic is not going to continue forever.

Once these troops and this fighting equipment has moved back, I would expect that's the end of large-scale US involvement for a bit, barring really, true catastrophe.

Evan Moloney: So in that situation, right, if this spectre that you're kind of raising comes to pass where Netanyahu is replaced by a more hardline figure within Israel, where does that leave the Middle East as a whole now that this precedent of full-scale war with Iran has been established?

Now that the IRGC is kind of taking over in Tyrron, now that we see potentially more hardline leadership in Israel, right? What does that set up and what does our new status quo tell us about the future of the region?

Wilfred W.: There's a comment I see a lot on our videos that Simon and the war from steam more broadly has this ability to start conflicts in order to keep ourselves in business. And I don't know if most people know this, but we are generally people who would want to see peace.

We'd want to see peace a lot more than most people know because gathering war does you way way down on yourself.

Wilfred W.: With that said, the prospect of what comes next generally scares me because whatever version of Iran survives this, whether they'll have their nuclear dust or not, one thing they will have is their stockpile of missiles, their stockpile of drones, which I haven't seen being mentioned in any negotiations.

It's something I mentioned fell off the table because all of the attention has been on the street of Homos and the nuclear dust. With this in mind, Iran will be like a corner tiger, a wounded lion. It will be a lot more dangerous than it has been in the past. 01:20:00

In part because of the pretty explosive growth of the Haredi Jewish community, who, as a not exclusively but on the main, do not serve. There are a few who do, but the vast majority do not, and they are trying to remain exempt from the draft there. Just for some context, birth rates can have some crazy impacts on this.

As of the founding of Israel, there were 400 Haredi Jews in the country who were exempt from conscription. Today, a quarter of Jewish children in Israel under four are Haredi. That is incredible to talk about. Kyle Moran: So it really just shows how some of that came through immigration, but a lot of it came through birth rates.

These guys have a lot of kids. They average somewhere around seven per woman, which is just massive. That's all I can say.

Yeah, just to weigh in here, I do think that the idea that we're heading toward a more peaceful period for the Middle East is not something to get your hopes up for. I'll give a little book recommendation as we wind down for the day. This is possibly my favourite geopolitical theory book I've ever read. It's called 'Why Men Rebel' by Ted Robert Gurr.

It's a very old book. It came out in 1970, and at the time it was about social uprising, social revolution.

Really, what it is is a book on relative power, and the main thesis is there's quite a few, but the one that always comes up again and again for me and is proven true at every juncture, whether we're talking about nation-states, whether we're talking about social movements, about individual people in life, in love, and in geopolitics, as so many things are.

Is this idea that nation-states are not at their most dangerous when they are powerful. They are at their most dangerous when they are losing power quickly and understand that they will be much less powerful tomorrow than they are today. And as we're seeing this degradation of Iran,

I don't think

A nation that has lost a fair share of certainly any remaining air power that it could even claim to have conventionally speaking. This is a country that is not going to have a great rebound anytime soon, right? The Iranian economy is going to suffer for a very long time. The Iranian military is going to be diminished for a very long time.

That being said, the spectre of a rising and more militaristic Israel and the spectre of continued degradation in the future in Iran would suggest to me that if Iran wants to reshape the status quo, then now is it time to act.

Especially as the situation in the Middle East has changed such that Iran has been provided new levers of power,

Right? This demonstrated ability to strike the Gulf States, this demonstrated ability to close down the Strait of Hormuz, all things that existed in theory, but there's a difference between having theory and having historical precedent. So, just something to think about.

Turkey is going to play a huge role on this. Kyle Moran: We have several pieces up on Turkey about this, including an article by yours truly over on fronts.co. Basically, I see Turkey as being a much more effective actor at doing what Iran sort of wanted to do, but just doing it in a way that was able to deliver so much more.

Iran has been since its founding a pariah state, one of their first actions was storming the US embassy and taking the entire diplomatic service there hostage, which did not exactly send an open-for-business signal to the rest of the world. Even the non-Americans were sort of looking at this as this may not be the best place to set up shop.

So, on the whole, they have been really weighed down by some of the more extreme stuff.

Erdogan has taken his country in a more conservative and hardline nationalist direction for sure, but he hasn't done any of these revolutionary actions that would make him into a pariah state, if you will.

So, overall, when he talks about standing up to Israel, I see this as having way more potential for the region than anything that Iran was able to do short of all kinetic action.

Yeah, on that front, I certainly agree. The Turkey-Israel rising confrontation as we see it now seems if it's going to get a lot more intense over the next few years and kind of dovetail in ways we've mentioned before with Amirad and Saudi rivalry and with Egypt's role in all this as it pertains to Ethiopia in particular but also to Israel.

A lot of different confrontational angles starting to pop up around the Middle East between nations that are now starting to recognise each other's coming confrontations and beginning to band together as a result.

So, not exactly a gentle prognostication for the Middle East, but as much as I think we want to believe that the long arc of history bends towards peace and prosperity and success, it's tough to see the short term here as something that leads us in that direction.

On that less than optimistic note, I think we are a bit over time, so we're going to wrap up for today. But before we do, Wilfrid, I'm going to go to you first with this. What are we watching in the coming week? Evan Moloney: What should we be aware of?

Wilfred W.: As I said,… Wilfred W.: One thing that I'm watching really closely and trying to learn a lot more about is the upcoming Israeli elections and the internal dynamics that are happening within Israel. Other than that, I am looking at Axios to try and see if I can gain some insight into the stock market and become not as rich as Elon Musk or...

Wilfred W.: Trump, but somewhere along those lines. 01:30:00

And I will be watching Lebanon very closely. Kyle Moran: Negotiations are set to wrap up in DC today this afternoon. We will see if anything of substance comes out of that.

I do think Trump is eager to have some win to show and I think Lebanon could be some low-hanging fruit in terms of getting these two sides to some form of agreement because the gap is there is much more narrow.

Lebanon's government is very hardline against Hezbollah's paramilitary forces right now and I think that getting the two on the same page would be relatively straightforward. Kyle Moran: This would require Israel to back down on some of its military expeditions, which may end up being the sticking point. We will see where all of this goes.

Evan Moloney: And just for my part, I'm watching the escalation cycle between Iran and the US as it plays out over the next couple of days. Having these strikes traded back and forth is one thing. Seeing what the next strikes are is quite another. Evan Moloney: I will be watching that and

I couldn't find anything. Evan Moloney: I will be watching Wilfrid's portfolio and seeing if I can replicate whatever big moves you try to make and... Wilfred W.: Don't do that. Evan Moloney: Let's see if we all can get quite a bit richer. No, kidding. Don't.

Evan Moloney: That's a long, long conversation about portfolio management and insider trading that we just don't have the time to get into today, but my goodness, that could keep us occupied for a very long time. On that note, this has been Evan Moloney with the Middle East round table of fronts.co here with Kyle Moran and

Wilfrid Wolfford Mina. Thank you so much for joining us. If you are at this point in the podcast, you are almost certainly a subscriber already to fronts.co. But why not check us out? We do lots more like this. We have exclusive episodes, articles at least twice a week, looking like a bit more than that now. So, thank you very much for your support.

We truly could not do this without you. This has been the fronts.co team, the Middle East round table. We'll see you next week.