Middle East Roundtable: Rising Pressure All Around.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Middle East Roundtable. I am Kyle Moran, filling in for Evan Maloney. With me is Wilfred Mina, who will take over in just a sec here.

But I do want to just say we have been following developments in the Strait of Hormuz so closely and have been monitoring the open one day, close the next day, and we just couldn't keep track with all that's been going on. So we've actually deployed Evan to the Strait of Hormuz, who should be reporting back to us relatively soon.

So as soon as we have an update from him there, we'll bring it straight to you. But in the meantime, I will be filling in for him. And Wilfred, if you want to take it from here. You made a wonderful Strait pun there that I really have to acknowledge. I love puns. They make the world go round.

But yes, speaking of the Strait of Hormuz, I do want to point out that one of my favorite analytics firms, Citrini Research, they have an amazing substat that I genuinely recommend everyone subscribe, even if it's just the free tier, just to, you know, check out what type of free stuff they post.

They actually did send someone to the Strait of Hormuz while the war was at its peak, while everything was going down. And they got some really good insights showing that Iran was managing to send through its shadow feed with the transponders off.

And basically, they were not sending, they're not transmitting any data that could be picked up on ship tracking websites, you know, the kinds that we use. So we had a really broken idea of the Strait of Hormuz before Citrini actually, you know, sent someone out into the field to provide some really cool data.

So yeah, hopefully when Evan gets back, he will have something as cool to share with us. Indeed. That reporting, by the way, that they did on the Strait was groundbreaking in the sense that we had a feeling, you know, you couldn't know exactly for sure.

We had a pretty good feeling that the vast majority or at least majority of Iranian shipping was indeed ground to a halt. But the extent to which they were actually able to bypass that was surprising to me. They were doing a lot of different maneuvers in terms of killing transponders, which you'd think the military would have been able to find a way around.

And we do want to be clear here that overall, the amount of shipping that has been going through the blockade is still pretty minimal compared to pre-blockade volume. But again, up against the U.S. Navy and whatnot, I was surprised that they have been able to sort of bypass it to such an extent.

Wilfred, I'm curious as to your thoughts as to where you see this going in terms of the blockade.

In fact, I'm curious as to where you see this going in terms of the blockade. terms of the overall importance to the United States on its behalf in these ongoing behind-the-scenes negotiations, if you will, as well as the importance Iran places on getting it opened ASAP. Okay, so that takes me to one of the funniest jokes I have seen this entire week.

This was posted by Javier Blas with a hat tip to the trader who actually told him the joke. So, you know, we thought we were getting a tackle from all his chickens out, but so far we're getting a nacho, not a chance home rules opens. And ladies and gentlemen, let me just say it.

This is why I do this job, so that I can get such jokes, because that is such a beautiful play on words. And I want to give a shout out to a guy called Robert Alpen, who added the following beautiful bit. Or is it Fahita's failure at jostling Iran towards a settlement? And as someone who absolutely loves wordplay, that is beautiful for me.

So yes, back to the main question you asked me, away from all these jokes.

On, I believe this was yesterday, so that will be the 28th of April, the Wall Street Journal posted a story saying that Trump has told his aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, basically saying the Strait of Hormuz, they're going to be in contention over it for a really long time.

Trump has suggested that they don't really need the entire straits to be opened, rather they need, you know, independent shipping lanes, single lanes that ships can use where it's been proven there are no mines, because as I want to remind our audience, the Iranian military, the Iranian Navy has placed mines along the strait, and some of those mines have

Gotten lost.

So at the moment, Trump is, you know, suggesting there could be some shipping lanes within the Strait of Hormuz that could be operational.

The issue with that, and you know, just the strait in general, is that one analyst that I really like, a guy called Baker Hughes, he said it will take at least six months, the Strait of Hormuz may not be fully open until the second half of 2026, again, you know, because of these mine issues.

So on the American side, the Strait of Hormuz is the best, one of the best tools they have to pressure Iran, because this is something that hasn't really received a lot of attention, but Iran is running out of space to put its oil, the crude oil that it mines from you, its oil reserves, Iran is running out of space to put it.

And this is a big issue, because once you run out of space, you... Where does the rest of the oil go? You can't just let it flow freely.

And if you let the oil mines, the shafts, to close up, then that is a really big issue because the pressure that is needed to force the oil from underground will drop significantly, so significantly that some mining shafts won't be able to open again.

And for Iran, this is a really big deal because about 1% to 2% of the Iranian people work directly within the mining of petroleum. And there's the downstream impacts. The number of people who work in petroleum-adjacent industries is extremely high.

So if Iran is looking at a situation where their storage capacity has completely dropped, has completely withered to the point where they're considering closing their mines and, in some cases, increasing the output of their refineries, Iran is well and truly, and I've used this in a lot of scripts of late Puba, so it's just a bad situation for Iran.

They want the Strait of Hormuz to be opened as quickly as possible so that they can go back to transporting their oil. I do want to point out one thing. Iran has been attempting to transport oil by rail to China, but as one analyst pointed out on Twitter, that is barely a stopgap. Anyway, it has a lot of high costs.

So again, just wanted to point out that Iran really needs the Strait of Hormuz open as soon as possible. So I do just want to sort of take a moment here to, I couldn't have said that better myself, by the way, but I want to take a moment and reflect on how much this has shifted.

I mean, going into this war, when they initially started to shut down the Strait, Iran that is, the entire narrative was that this was the Islamic Republic's, the ace up its sleeve, if you will. But by doing this blockade, the U.S. has like flipped the narrative almost completely. I mean, not 100 percent because oil prices remain elevated.

Gas prices here in the United States are significantly higher than they were before the war. And that will have spillover effects in terms of inflationary pressure on just about anything else that needs to be transported.

But in terms of this holding pattern that we're in, we've gone from a narrative where Trump is increasingly desperate to get out, which is what a bunch of different analysts were putting out even just a few weeks ago. to a situation where it's almost the U.S. trying to outweigh the Iranians. And we sort of touched on this.

We were getting a sense that this is the direction he was going in last week on last week's roundtable.

But the very interesting thing is it seems that both sides now have completely gone down that road and are now talking about just trying to outweigh the other because both of them think that they're winning, which is a very unique dynamic because on the one hand, you have the IRGC in this part, mostly led by Vahidi, who believes that the Islamic Republic has

The upper hand here and can outweigh the United States.

And then the U.S. thinks because of the economic side of this, they can outweigh the Iranians. So I'm sort of curious as to your thoughts as to who actually does have the upper hand here. I'll go back to the assessment that I brought up in my initial remarks that Iran is running out of space to put its oil.

That is, for me, the biggest determining factor of who has the upper hand in this case.

As long as Iran thought it had space, thought it could outmanover the U.S. blockade and, you know, get some ships to pass through, to pass through the blockade and, you know, transport its oil, oil was, you know, pretty much, okay, I would have said they were on pretty, you know, even footing.

But as, you know, as soon as the U.S. realized they could stop Iran from, you know, transporting oil, they could limit their ability to, you know, completely bypass the blockade.

But I think the upper hand shifted significantly towards the U.S. And, you know, one of the reasons why the assessments kept coming up that Trump wants to get out of this war is because the midterms are coming up. And as you mentioned, the price of oil spiking will have a significant inflationary effect on basically everything.

And inflation does not play well in an election year. That's true. Something else that doesn't play well in an election year is constant fighting, especially from a president who promised that, you know, he wouldn't get the U.S. into any more new wars.

He wouldn't go down the path of the neoconservatives that, you know, dragged the U.S. into decades and decades of wars within the Middle East. So that was a very big limiting factor for Trump. But now with a blockade, it doesn't have as high a political cost.

Yes, there are going to be inflationary pressures because of the issues with the Strait of Hormuz that is, you know, undoubtedly going to happen. So in my view, Trump has, you know, that's a big part of the P.S. You don't know. figured out if this is going to happen, if this inflation is still going to happen, let's just keep this trade blockaded.

Let's prevent Iran from doing this. And that will be the deciding factor. The inflation is already going to happen. The impact on the midterm is pretty much locked in unless the Democrats can find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And, you know, they are my party. I say this with a lot of love. If there is a way, they will find it.

But yeah, I don't think the war is going Iran's way right now. All the cuts are with President Trump, the Americans and Israel as a whole. Yeah, I think the oil part that you touched on there is just so damning to their economic situation.

Keep in mind for the audience who may not follow this as religiously as Wilfred and myself here, the situation that kicked off the protests to begin with was an economic one that started in late December. The Iranian economy has long been ailing, if you will, through U.S. sanctions as well as just general mismanagement and a big collapse in their currency.

So last year, it sort of reached a tipping point where they just couldn't handle this anymore. And they started to take to the streets. And one thing sort of led to another on that. So the overall protests weren't entirely economic, but the thing that actually started it all really was.

And so right now, we're looking at a situation where Iran's economy is going to be in significantly worse shape at the end of this than it was even just at the start of the year. And I have just a little bit of information here that I want to bring to the surface.

So we are now about 60 days into their internet blackout, which has been the longest in any state's modern history. Now, given that how much of the economy, including in Iran, just runs on internet infrastructure, this has been incredibly damning to their economic prosperity.

The Iranian Chamber of Commerce, one of their officials stated on April 14th, that the shutdown is costing 30 to 40 million U.S. dollars in direct daily losses. So I mean, take that, multiply it by 60. And that's some serious money.

A lot of Iranians who were working based off of the internet, especially if they were remote or something like that, this is going to be, a lot of them just don't have jobs anymore because of this. And the government is aware of this. But again, this is where the infighting between like the reformist versus the hardliners really solidifies.

So like Vahidi and the hardline IRGC elements are almost explicitly saying that this is a secondary concern. They're not going to come out and say they don't care, but they're basically going as far as they can in that direction without actually saying it. So, you know, they're talking about the economic stuff. We'll just have to deal with it later.

The absolute essentials here, not making concessions to the United States, maintaining a maximalist position, you know, we'll figure out the economics later. Whereas Galiboff, Puzeshkian, they're at least playing to the narrative that they understand what the country's going through.

But overall, this seems to me to be a compelling point that could actually be a game changer in the way that a continued air operation simply was not going to be.

So by the time the U.S. stopped bombing, it was relatively clear to me that even if you started it up again, even like whatever the U.S. was going to throw at Iran, this wasn't going to accomplish a whole hell of a lot more on that front because they had been bombing for a month and they took out a significant amount of Iran's centralized leadership.

But because of their mosaic doctrine and decentralized command and all that stuff, there just was limited and diminishing, I would argue, returns on investment on continuing a bombing campaign.

But this economic approach, to your point, Wilfred, it has a much less intense political cost as well, because when we're actually bombing, and I'm in the United States myself, when we're bombing a country, that's headline news. You know, most people are aware, oh, wow, we're bombing Iran.

As of right now, though, is there a sense in the United States amongst the, you know, not obviously the very political people know this, that we're blockading Hormuz. But right now, it's not in the headlines nearly as much.

You know, there's people discussing about talks and ongoing stuff, but it's not a sense of being at war, if you will, in the same sense it was before.

So I think that this gives Trump significantly more leeway to continue the operation via the operation economic theory as opposed to epic theory in a way that sort of shields him from some of the more political fallback.

Speaking of the political fallback, part of what makes war so costly for any leadership that chooses to pursue it is the constant images of civilians houring in fright. dead, dying. Basically, anytime there's a war and civilians are suffering, especially if it's a war instigated by a Western country, those images come back to haunt American leadership.

When the war began, there were reports that an American missile had struck an Iranian girl's killing 162 students, teachers, workers, just the whole shebang. And that was a very, very big moral blow within the American people who are actively watching this war because you don't want to be on the side that is killing children.

No one wants to be on the side that's killing children, even if it's done accidentally, even if it's a failure of intelligence, a failure to update whatever maps needed to be updated in order for that strike not to happen. That was a really big blow to the entire campaign. And within Iran, it proved to be a very unifying factor.

We call it the rally around the flag effect. The fact that American troops had in effect killed 160 civilians in that first strike, as well as killing Ali Khamenei, the former supreme leader, that proved enough to, within that moment, unify the Iranian people against the attacking forces.

And I'm not saying that there isn't a rebellion, there isn't a feeling within Iran that the IRGC and the entire Islamic regime absolutely sucks. It's still there. But when the alternative is people who are bombing civilians, bombing the infrastructure that allows the people within Tehran to make their living, as you said, people are going to be without jobs.

People are going to be really suffering. So yeah, there was a diminishing ROI in the sense that as long as the bombing campaign continued as aggressively as it was, the chances of an uprising were going to be extremely slim.

They're going to be just very narrow because there were, again, there's little use in siding with the people who are already bombing the country. Another thing I want to talk about is just how this has almost guaranteed the regime's survival. Yes, Iran's economy is in absolute shambles.

And yes, that economic pressure in December and January led to the biggest protests that Iran has seen since the revolution that put the Islamic regime in place. But according to use of the Danny Citrinowicz, he just posted a new article in Foreign Affairs.

All that economic pressure is secondary to the fact that the IRJC has new hardliners in place who are so extreme that if another revolution were to break out, they will stamp it out with cruelty that I don't think the world is ready to witness. So for the moment, the regime seems to be surviving.

Whether that will hold here with Iran's economy going down the drain by the day, who's to tell? But yeah, it's just something I wanted to point out.

One thing I'm always cautious on about covering when we're talking about what Iranians think of this is there is just so much uncertainty as to where the people of Iran actually stand because of the ongoing internet blackout. The only voices from Iran that are actually getting out right now are, there's two routes.

Okay, so there's the first being regime-approved interviews, if you will. They'll go around and talk about various different things with people on the streets of Tehran, with government and media. So, I mean, obviously this is not that credible. The second being anyone who's fleeing from Iran.

And we've seen some of this in Al-Monitor who have had excellent coverage. But the broader point I want to make here is I want to be cautious as to saying like either, I want to caution against saying Iran is or is not supportive of anything in particular because on some level this is just pure speculation.

And I'm cautious about that on both fronts because on the one hand, you'll listen to Lindsey Graham who's making it out to be the, I mean, they're all, they're 100% against the Islamic Republic and then the regime is, they're 100% behind it. So, I just want to caution against that.

I do think that in the long run, something like the crackdown in January is going to have way more long-lasting effects than the tragedy that was that bombing, which I was very, very saddened to see.

But when you're just talking about scale here, almost 40,000, I believe it was 36,500 in 48 hours murdered by the regime across the country is so widespread and so impossible to just even imagine that sort of death toll in just two days. So, I do have to imagine that the regime's brutality on that is going to be more remembered. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't think, certainly I don't want to put any Iranians in the position of choosing between one or the other here. But I think in general, when you're looking at living with this regime moving forward, this would be something they'll remember for some time. Wilfred?

So I definitely get your point about prefacing what we are saying with a caveat that getting information out of Iran is extremely, extremely difficult. The internet blackout is one of the worst we've seen in recent times.

And I'm saying this as a person who lives in Kenya, Africa, where internet blackouts are the order of the day, especially when you have a really repressive government in the middle of elections. We saw this in Uganda. We saw this in Tanzania, countries that are neighboring my own Kenya.

When they had their own elections last year, and this was last year and this year, they did shut down the internet. There were credible complaints from civilians within those countries about the scale and just how widespread that kind of internet blackout can be.

So I just want to preface this with understanding that, yes, we don't really have a full picture of what's going on in Iran, but there is a report out from Al Jazeera, make of that what you will, about just how bad the situation in Iran is right now. The piece is called Life in Limbo.

Kyle, I will send it to you away, and hopefully our team can link it within somewhere on our page so that people can read it. But this is one of the most interesting pieces I have read about the situation in Iran. I am usually very interested in covering what life is like for civilians in the middle of a war.

I covered what life was like for civilians after the capture of Maduro. I covered what life was like for civilians in Iran in about two weeks after the war. So I just want to read a little from this piece in Al Jazeera.

In eastern Tehran, Sajad, a young man in his 20s, stands in front of the twisted iron and shattered concrete that was once his father's home. The ruins have been left completely untouched since the bombardment. Who will rebuild all this, he asks, his voice thick with grief. Sajad's despair captures the suspended reality of millions in the Iranian capital.

A fragile truce between the U.S. and Iran has caused air attacks, and Pakistani-mediated talks have sent Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Agachi to Islamabad, Moskart and Moscow in recent days. Yet, on the streets of Tehran, the absence of bombing does not equate to peace. I'll skip a little bit more. There's just a little bit more background.

There's a quote here by an architect called Sajad. Sajad Sajad Sajad I think, is really, really telling. If the war returns tomorrow, everything we build will be a new target. So for the people there, and just one more quote. This is lovely. I hadn't seen this. For 52-year-old Mariam, the housing crisis is acute.

Her home near the Supreme Leader's office was destroyed in the first rival strikes. Initially placed in a government-funded hotel, she recently received an eviction notice while officials promised a rental loan. She says the sum is woefully inadequate.

I don't know how we will live in a small apartment that does not resemble our memories and does not suit our needs. So, again, this is from Al Jazeera, so make of that what you will. This paints a picture of the Iranian people really, really desperate, particularly those in Tehran. They've lost their homes. They've lost their livelihoods.

And again, because of the economic conditions of the country and just how badly the blockade is, pardon my French here, fucking the economy, the government is unable to really provide the kind of assistance that would be expected of it in such a situation. So, for the bombings, they obviously blame America and Israel.

And, you know, this, again, could be simply a case of regime-approved voices being allowed to speak to a friendly outlet. There's absolutely a real chance that is what we are seeing right now. Or it could be the genuine feeling on the ground. What I don't know is who they are blaming for the economic issues. Are they blaming Tehran?

Because, as we've seen in the past, they are savvy enough to figure out that Tehran has spent way too much money funding proxies all across the Middle East instead of investing in its people. I know this is a claim that Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has made in the past, but I just wanted to reiterate it.

It's something that does stand out whenever you think about the economic situation in Iran. If Tehran had spent the money it's spending on its proxies to actually improve the lives of the Iranian people, would the situation be any different? So, yeah, again, it's a very complex situation.

It's a situation where we don't really have any way of understanding what's actually going on. I spoke with the Iranian ambassador to Kenya about a little bit day after, the Monday after the war began, and I've maintained close ties with the Iranian embassy in Kenya.

I asked if it was possible to... travel to iran and he said once flights resume it should be possible so hopefully one day i should be on the ground and i should be able to give you guys feedback on what it's actually like if you know the opportunity ever does present itself i myself have long wanted to travel to lebanon i have been to a few places in the

Middle east and but in terms of on the ground reporting you just can't beat it and on some level for that on that front where we're all outside of the country outside of iran dependent on whatever reporting can get out and so there's it is almost an impossible battle to figure out where some of the story comes down because how much of this is playing for the

Team and how much of this is capturing broader sentiment you know so al jazeera has i have an interesting relationship with them they do they have ground the people in the ground in literally every conflict which gives them a unique advantage because they can spend this money in ways that other outlets do not i to date still have not seen a single voice that

They've aired critical of the regime in terms of that sort of on the ground stuff so that's kind of what i get at in terms of you know you're going around with state approved journalists and that they are any journalist broadcasting from inside iran right now which is separate from prior to the war where they had slightly more independence but any journalist

Broadcasting with internet access from inside iran has a government issued sim card they're called white sim cards and they're they get those for a reason they're not passing this out just for the interest of journalists everywhere so that when you start seeing these different outcomes it's very difficult to pin down wilfred if you're able to get to iran i

Would be very interested in seeing what you're able to capture there my own personal speculation here being there is some genuine divides here there is a very hardcore pro-islamic republic base in iran who i mean will not back down there's a very hardcore anti-regime base at this point who will not accept this regime carrying on and want nothing more than to

See it draw its last breath and then you of course have those caught in the middle who just want to get about their day-to-day life so it really is a tragic position and i think that takes us sort of to a natural turning point in our discussion here away from Iran, but very much still in the Middle East, to the conflict that's been going on in Lebanon, just

To catch everybody up.

The ongoing ceasefire is quasi, in effect, is how I'll put that. A ceasefire was agreed between the Lebanese state and Israel a few weeks ago. They've extended it for three weeks now, so we have about two weeks left as they continue negotiations.

Hezbollah, for their part, rejected the negotiations before they even began, and vowed that they would not abide by any of their terms, and have made good on that promise thus far, with no indication that they have any desire to change that status quo.

Unfortunately, that has meant continued Hezbollah attacks on Israel, and continued Israeli attacks, specifically in the south of Lebanon, as well as more recently, ongoing attacks, or airstrikes, I believe, via the IDF into the Beqa Valley in the east of Lebanon.

So, overall, where I sort of see this, and I'm curious as to your thoughts, Wilfred, where I currently see this going is a stalemate in which the Lebanese government is caught between a rock and a hard place, where it understands that an ongoing armed Hezbollah presence in the country will essentially guarantee dragging the country into war repeatedly, as

They have demonstrated in the past, and do not seem particularly willing to compromise on.

At the same time, because of how factionalized the country is, I don't necessarily know if the LAF has it in them to fully disarm the group, because they have... Hezbollah was tacitly accepting disarmament south of the Latani, but drew an absolute red line, hell no, over north of the Latani River. However, when...

And even as you can see, the LAF's performance south of the Latani left a lot of munitions there. So, when it comes to actually doing this throughout the entire country, I don't know if they have the manpower, the resources, or the political capital, if you will, to actually finish this job.

And I don't see how this can reach a natural conclusion without one of these sides sort of emerging victorious here. I agree with you, Kyle. And I know most of our listeners will find it extremely dispensating that we are agreeing so much on this podcast.

We normally don't agree this much, but yeah, the Lebanese government is caught between a rock and a hard place because... Because a really big issue is the simple fact that Hezbollah is really, really pervasive within the entire Lebanese system.

I like to think back on the Peja attack that Israel launched against Hezbollah, which from a purely intelligence standpoint stands out to me as the single biggest coup an intelligence agency has managed to pull off.

I don't think there's anything, at least within the modern era, that can come close to that just because it's just such a complex operation to figure out that Hezbollah was going to switch from phones to Pejas and to figure out who was going to supply them.

And again, to infiltrate the suppliers enough to get bombs into the Pejas, make the bombs small enough that they can feature the Pejas and they're not detectable, but still large enough to have an impact once detonated.

Again, I think that is one of the most complex, complexly carried out, but one of the most amazing intelligence operations, you know, away from me waxing lyrical about this. I just, I want to point out one thing about that attack. A lot of the people who were carrying those Pejas were not, you know, armed combatants in the way we think of them.

They might consider themselves Hezbollah members, you know, they were doctors, they were just regular people, but it's a sign of how widespread Hezbollah is and just how much political capital it has within the Lebanese society.

So if the government were to go, you know, full harm and try and fully disarm them, we could be looking at a full-blown Lebanese civil war with people, and even members of the LAF itself, choosing to side with Hezbollah over the Lebanese government. So yeah, the Lebanese government is caught between a rock and a hard place. Israel will definitely not relent.

Its security comes first, and that is completely understandable. No one should live in a situation where they keep, you know, being afraid for their lives, keep seeing rockets launched into their homesteads, into their neighborhoods. That is not the way to live.

So yeah, Hezbollah has proven to be intransigent, and Israel is, you know, rightfully defending itself. Some of this, to me, is going to come down to what the Shia community majoritively decides. And by and large, they have represented a pretty stalwart base for Hezbollah.

For listeners who are perhaps less first in intricate Lebanese politics, Hezbollah is not exclusively a... military organization. They are also a political party that holds seats in parliament, and they have formed almost a state within a state.

So when you go around to some of the more pro-Hezbollah territories, especially in the south, whether that's in Qiyam or Bint Jabil or somewhere like that, or if you're in the east in the Beka Valley, you're going to see Hezbollah flags flying in place of the Lebanese state flag. The group truly functions as sort of a state within a state.

And because of the gridlock that's existed in the Lebanese government for decades at this point, Hezbollah has almost had this advantage where, because it needs consult only itself and Tehran, once it gets approval, it can sort of just do what it needs to get done in a way that the Lebanese government has seriously struggled.

Hezbollah has lost a lot of political influence over the last two years, especially in the aftermath of the 2024 war with Israel. The country did not even have a president for over two full years because Hezbollah refused to hold votes in parliament.

They would walk out with their Amal colleagues, which just stopped the process entirely because a quorum wouldn't be present. For two years, the country had no president. So that has gone away. And they have a new prime minister, Nawaf Salam, who has been very hardline against the group in terms of state monopoly of power.

Now, the appetite for removing Hezbollah as an entity in and of itself does not exist within the Lebanese state to any sufficient extent that could actually be delivered on. But in terms of the state monopoly of power, this is where I see this as being a potential breaking point that could either go very badly or very well.

I can't tell you which it's going to be. But we'll see how this goes. But I think that this situation has really shattered the illusion that has dominated previous coverage of the of the crisis there. For years, it was sort of assumed that because Hezbollah is this strong, you just have to find a way to live with them.

You know, you can work with them and you can find a way to integrate them into the political process. And you're just going to have to get by somehow.

These last two wars with Israel have shattered that, I think, because previous conflicts with Israel, notwithstanding, they had much more support because they were ostensibly presenting themselves as fighting for Lebanon in 2024 and 2026. The rationale behind their operations has not been Lebanon. It has been for Iran.

And the expectation has been that the Lebanese people, both their own supporters as well as everybody else in the country, simply has to pay this price so that they can fight on behalf of their Iranian allies. And that does not go over well. And I think this has sort of shattered the myth that a Lebanese state, or honestly, I think this applies anywhere.

I don't think you can have a coherent just as a concept. I don't think you can have a unified government, a unified state in which you have a very centralized paramilitary organization with a political wing that can basically hold the country hostage.

So I'm curious as to, do you think that we have reached a point in which Hezbollah simply cannot, it's accepted that Hezbollah simply cannot exist in its military formation alongside the Lebanese state?

Or do you think we're still in a period where, because the Lebanese government isn't strong enough, they're going to have to try to find some way to live with them? I think it depends on who you ask. For your people within the Lebanese government, people like Awun and Nawaf Salam, the simple answer is, in its militarized form, Hezbollah cannot exist anymore.

And I completely agree with them. The cost they're imposing on the Lebanese people, and as you said, they are doing it on behalf of Iran, is exceptionally high. It will be unacceptable in almost any other country, any other society.

So for the other case, for the people who will think that Hezbollah is still strong enough that the Lebanese government has to live with you, this is a case we generally do have to consider.

Because as I mentioned, there is a risk that a full-fledged effort to disarm the group, cold, lead the country down the path of civil war, you know, with people more aggressively, more actively choosing to side with Hezbollah. So for me, I'm split. I don't think that Lebanon should exist without Hezbollah as a destabilizing force.

But at the same time, I recognize that particularly within the Shia community, as you mentioned, they form the backbone of support for Hezbollah. And Iran is considered the Shiite Muslim country. So within, among the Shia population and you, I don't want to speak. for them.

I'm just making an assumption based off of my understanding and my reading of Lebanon. You're based off of the time we've spent working on the Middle East, which for me is about four years of consistently reading and trying to find as much as I can about this.

The shared population in Lebanon will always have a level of love and support for Hezbollah It's always going to be there It's just a fact that we have to accept.

So whether that will translate into widespread mobilization, widespread your recruitment, if the policies of the government towards Hezbollah and towards disarming them become too aggressive I honestly cannot see too many factors at play here for me to be able to make a single declarative statement. So yeah I'm torn.

I think I think for now as the situation stands, the Lebanese government will just have to find a way to live with Hezbollah, even as unpalatable as that sounds. So we have reached a point of disagreement then.

So we do have something to take home on this because I think that the myth like I was saying previously, I think the myth of finding a way to coexist with Hezbollah as a military organization has just expired.

Lebanon previously had sectarian paramilitaries, so there was the there were Christian paramilitaries just for audience who isn't necessarily as familiar with this. Lebanon has four main religious groups, three of which are pretty big, one rather small. So we have Shia Muslims, you have Sunni Muslims, you have Christians, and you have Druze with a D, not J.

There are a few Jewish Lebanese people, but it's like double digits there, so not exactly a major population. In terms of these paramilitaries, though, after the Civil War, they all agreed to disarm with one exception, Hezbollah.

Okay, so when it comes to sectarian identity politics and sectarian military paramilitary organizations, all of them were in the position that the Shia are in now, where it's sort of like, okay, do we want to give up these weapons? We're going to lose some influence if we do. We're going to lose this, like, blackmail ability over the state.

That's, I understand that's, that can be a concern, but the Shia are not inherently ordained to have the only sectarian paramilitary in Lebanon. If the others have laid down their weapons, Hezbollah must do the same as well. The Lebanese government has been increasingly clear about this.

And I think that being Because of the scale of this, it's just reached a point where the support of Hezbollah amongst non-Shia Muslims in the country has never been lower. They used to have genuine support from some Christians. They were in alliance with the former president this century, by the way. So this wasn't like ages and ages ago.

And they even had some support from Sunni Muslims as well. But that is almost essentially gone at this point. The population of Lebanon is, I believe, 7 million people. It's a very small country. So when we're talking about over a million people displaced, this is an enormous percentage of the country that has been uprooted.

And while we can discuss the wiseness or mistakes that Israel may or may not be making on this, the Israeli claims with Lebanon are just so transparently different than something like with Palestinian issues. Because the Lebanese land is not of particular interest to Israel.

They have one goal with whatever they do in Lebanon, which is to get it to stop shooting at them. So when it comes to, like, annexing land in the West Bank and former settlements in Gaza, all of this, that's a completely separate approach.

But I just want to make clear that when we're talking about Lebanon, the issue simply is that Hezbollah keeps attacking Israel. And Israel is, at this point, just guaranteed to respond. This is just the reality of the situation. And so if Hezbollah is allowed to remain in its military form, this is just going to keep happening.

And people are just going to keep dying on both sides. We've tried the situation where, you know, you try to make nice, you try to incorporate them into government, blah, blah, blah. It just doesn't work when they have this paramilitary wing. So I do understand that this may be a breaking point in terms of escalating violence.

But I just see this as almost inevitable at this point. I don't know how you can take this back. Like, Joseph Aoun is publicly accusing them of being traitors to the country for siding with Iran on this and dragging the country into war. Once this type of language is being used, I don't see how they can just sort of go back and say, ah, you know, whatever.

Yeah, they still have all of their guns, but, you know, we'll see. Because in two years' time, this is just going to kick off again. So I'm concerned as to the stability of the country, for sure.

But I do not see any world in which the status quo of yesterday, and by yesterday I mean like pre-2024, is able to... carry through i want to explain my thinking a little bit and before i do that there's a point you made about the population of lebanon being about seven million and how a million people being displaced it is a really huge number so lebanon

Has a population of about six million it's slightly lower so which means the past oh did i say seven yeah i meant i meant six yeah it's even greater that's just you know the point i wanted to make that the civilian suffering currently happening within lebanon is unmistakably massive it's just completely completely in intolerable unthinkable it's it's

Something i don't even want to witness so not that you know i want to witness any other type of human suffering just i wanted to put that out there but the reason why i think the government of lebanon will despite you know i won't saying that hezbollah are traitors for siding with iran over the lebanese people is because of what happened in sudan in sudan

For anyone who's unfamiliar with the situation currently ongoing there are two groups that are fighting the sudanese armed forces and the paramilitary rapid support forces the rsf did have political power at one point they were part of the coalition that came to govern sudan after the fall of former president omar al-bashir but because of your those kinds of

Disagreements with the central government with the sudanese armed forces about not necessarily disarming the rsf but integrating them within the main force that spiked a war that has caused some of the greatest devastation we have seen to date just go watch our coverage of the al-fasha genocide if you want a true picture a true scale of just how great the

Suffering is there so you with sudan and al-fasha in mind i think i again as unpalatable as this sounds it would be in the government's best interest not to not to rock the boat too much not to because yes i want to insist here i want a lebanon where hezbollah is not a military force wilford can see me shaking my head for context oh definitely but i want a

Lebanon that exists here with sans hezbollah without the constant fear that your israel will conduct airstrikes you know because it's trying to defend itself from this paramilitary group so you But at the same time, history has shown us that extremely aggressive efforts to disarm a group that, you know, has as much influence as Hezbollah and backfire in

Really bad ways.

They are, I do want to make clear, they are in a significantly weakened state of being, though. So if this was pre-2024 campaign, I'd be more receptive to this argument because they did have way more fighters, way more munitions. The LAF did remove thousands of munitions and arms from the south of the Latani. They haven't touched north of the Latani.

So that's still an ongoing issue. And I'm not making it out to be that Hezbollah doesn't have anything left. They do. They could make this quite ugly if they wanted to. But the alternative is, I mean, I just want to paint a clear picture.

If the Lebanese government does not deliver on serious reforms on this to disarm, Israel is almost certainly going to at least temporarily occupy significant portions of the south of the country and continue operations elsewhere as well. I don't see a world in which they don't. But the government, after 2024, agreed to work with the Lebanese government.

They withdrew all of their forces. They had some in the south of the country during the 2024 campaign. And it just, the strategy there just did not work. The LAF did not deliver. They declared phase one to have been completed at the end of, at the beginning of this year. But it just, they didn't, they didn't deliver.

This is partially because of the sectarian divides in the country, which is deeply concerning to me for the reasons you were talking about. But at the same point, the Hezbollah, at this point, we just have to see that they are willing to destroy the country for their ideology, for their alliances.

And anything other, at this point, than a hard line on that, is going to be perceived by the, by the group as weakness to be exploited. Because Hezbollah has known for decades that the Lebanese government is too scared to confront them. And they've exploited that many times.

They threaten civil war any time the government does something that they deem to be a critical threat to them. They're doing it now. Whether or not they actually have the ability to do something like that is to be determined. I mean, I, it's a grim situation. Don't get me wrong.

But I just don't see at this point how the Lebanese government can back out of it. I don't think we'll come to an agreement on this one. So, in the interest of time, I'd like... Just to move to something completely different, but still within our image as the Middle East Roundtable and onto a country that you and I follow really, really closely.

Let's talk about Iraq and their decision to appoint a political newcomer as the prime minister who will form the government. So this was on the 27th of April, two days before we're recording this. And I'm reading this from the New York Times in case Inon is interested in following along with our sources.

Iraq's president names political newcomer to form government. After months of tensions and pressures from both the U.S. and Iran, Ali al-Zahidi, a businessman, was named as prime minister delegate. So, Kyle, I want to get your thoughts on this. What do you think about al-Zahidi's appointment? Well, I can't say I saw it coming. He's definitely an outsider.

I think that could help. I was very relieved that Maliki is not going to be the next prime minister. He was the one who famously oversaw the less-than-stellar performance, shall we say, of the Iraqi army against the rise of ISIS.

He had largely played along hard-line sectarian lines in the lead-up to it and basically was saying he replaced a lot of military people with sectarian allies of his. And it gutted the military as well as destroyed their readiness in Mosul, which just absolutely folded to ISIS in a way that's still to this day shocking to me.

I'm pessimistic as to how much this man is actually able to be able to deliver on, less out of any animosity I have towards him and way more out of concern as to the weakness of the Iraqi government relative to the Iranian-backed militias in the country.

Some of them are explicit—I see this almost as like a Lebanon 2.0 situation where the Popular Mobilization Forces, PMF, is this umbrella term. So it's not centralized like Hezbollah in Lebanon, but it is a similar dynamic where the government is almost the second power in the country to these paramilitaries.

And even worse than Lebanon is they don't even agree on everything. So whereas Hezbollah can at least—you have the Lebanese state and then you have Lebanon—Hezbollah, rather. And it can sort of simplify things.

Iraq is just— absolute mess in terms of trying to govern because you have all of these different competing groups and within the PMF, even within the pro-Iran faction, you have hardline groups and then you have supportive but not all the way hardline supportive groups. So it's really going to be an uphill battle.

And recently we did an episode on war fronts on this. The Iraqi government greenlit the PMF. I can't even believe I'm saying this. They greenlit the PMF to respond to American attacks. So, I mean, the Iraqi government was authorizing out of intimidation factor, I will say. They did not particularly want this.

The caretaker, Prime Minister Sudani, is not in favor of war with the United States, I can assure you of that. But they greenlit strikes on American locations throughout the Middle East in response to bombing of the PMF. So that's a story that goes to show you how much influence these groups have. I agree. They do have an outsized influence.

And for me, the appointment of, excuse me, I had something caught in my throat, of al-Zaidi as Prime Minister, I do, as you said, I do wonder if he will be successful because according to Iraqi media, he doesn't have any prior political experience. He's a really wealthy gentleman.

But, you know, as we've seen in many cases, wealth doesn't necessarily translate to the kind of political savvy and requisite experience you'd need to run a country, especially one, as you've just wonderfully explained, as complicated as Iraq. Because it's not just the shared groups, the PMF that he'll have to deal with. There are also Sunni insurgents.

There are also Kurdish, excuse me, Kurdish groups. He has to balance a lot. And for someone as politically inexperienced as him, there is a significant fear. And I might be the only one seeing it, because the New York Times describes him as a compromise candidate, that he could be used as a pawn for other factions. And they rule through him.

So that is, again, just something worth considering. So I want to read a very interesting passage from the New York Times about Al-Maliki's withdrawal.

Mr. al-Maliki withdrew his candidacy for the role of prime minister, as did Mr. al-Sudani, according to a statement from the coordination framework, which commended their responsible and historic stances on Monday.

This step underscores their commitment to the supreme national interests, facilitates overcoming the political deadlock, and allows the coordination framework to select a candidate who meets the required qualifications for the position of prime minister and is suited to the demands and challenges of this stage.

So if the coordination framework is publicly praising al-Maliki, I wonder what concessions he got to agree to step down from the race. So again, that's just something worth considering and something we will be observing as the days and weeks. I do want to point out one more thing in the Middle East that I found really, really interesting this week.

The first trial of an Assad-related official has begun in Syria. So the defendant, and this is from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, a think tank whose work I find very interesting.

The defendant is Atef Najib, who is the cousin of Assad and the former head of the intelligence services political security branch in the southwestern province of Daraa. Najib oversaw the arrest and tortured children who had graffitied walls with anti-regime slogans.

His punishments helped ignite the protests against the Assad regime that erupted in March 2011, initially in Daraa, and others on trial in the Syrian conflict.

While other trials related to the Syrian conflict have taken place in Europe, the prosecution of Najib is a notable example of a national authority prosecuting crimes committed on its own territory, rather than relying on international mechanisms.

So again, Syria is really making steps to move on from the Assad era into something wholly new and wholly welcome. Kyle, to you, my friend. Indeed. Thank you. Syria, in particular, I have concerns about because they have been losing control of the situation there, in my view, for some time. These sort of trials are low-hanging fruit for the government.

It costs them nothing. They're also trying Bashar al-Assad in absentia. But again, this is something that just sort of placates the anti-Assad people in the country. By all means, a very brutal dictatorship. Glad to see them delivering on some of these reforms.

But on a more macro level, just as a preview, we do have an episode coming out soon, written by yours truly, on Syria losing control of Sueda. province, which is in the south of the country. The Druze there have almost unilateral control.

I don't want to completely overstate the situation, but it is telling to me that they have been able to largely take over the province, which represents about four to five percent of the total territorial borders.

So in terms of moving forward, the state has just struggled for such a long time with domestic security against various factionalization and sectarian divides. Not to beat a dead horse here, this, of course, being an ongoing issue throughout pretty much all of the Middle East. We are almost out of time.

So with that, I do just want to bring Brett back to Lebanon here. There is some breaking news.

I'm just seeing Joseph Owen was just addressing that he is currently waiting for a green light from the Trump administration on the next round of negotiations and has said that the only thing that can protect the borders of Lebanon is when the Lebanese state with its full strength is present in the entire south all the way to the international border.

And I have nothing but strong agreement with President Owen on that. So unless there's anything from you, Wilfred? I just want to say, I'm in agreement with President Owen as well. Lebanon should be able to influence whatever happens with the things on borders. Amen to that. So with that concludes this episode of the Middle East Roundtable.

One person down from usual. Still waiting to hear on Evan. Maybe the connection in the Strait of Hormuz is a little shoddy. I don't know. But we'll bring you up to date information as soon as we hear from him. He will be back next week, though. So make sure to tune in then. And until next time, we will see you over on Warfronts. Thank you very much.