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title: "Middle East Roundtable: Stuck Till 2029."
description: "Hello and welcome to the Middle East Roundtable here at Fronts.co. This is Evan Maloney. I am here with Kyle Moran, staff writer here at Warfronts. And we have yet another big week in the Middle East. So the blockade is ongoing with Iran. The U.S. has been firing just yesterday, actually earlier yesterday, on a ship that tried to run past it. Meanwhile, Iran has been firing on vessels transiting close to the Omani route throughout the last week. So it's been an ongoing mess in the region, as usual. Meanwhile, in domestic Iranian politics, they have a new secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. This guy, Mohsen Rezai, is a very, very hard-line figure, to say the least. He replaced Mohammed Bagar Zolgahader, who used to be, or he had himself replaced, Larajani, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike earlier this year. So it's seemingly just this endless cycle of choosing an even more extreme figure. We can get into the exact details on him in a moment. But, Evan, overall, it's looking like the region is trending in the opposite direction as to what most countries' preferences would be. It does. It's one of those weeks where, you know, if no news is good news, then Middle East news is bad news. And that's where we've been stuck for a bit, and it looks like it's where we're going to be stuck for a little while longer. One housekeeping note before we move on. As you can hear, our co-host Wilford is not with us. He is currently working as the warfront's envoy to Oman to try and put a finger on the scales of this deal, see if we can kind of get some concessions for our media empire during these Iranian and Omani negotiations to see if we can get in on some straight action. Which, if we can, by the way, premium subscribers will be entitled to 1% share of all oil revenues from the strait reformers for the foreseeable future. So, congratulations in advance. We'll see if Wilford can figure that out. Now, on to more serious business, we do want to start with this big headline from Iran over the last few days, which is that Iran, as of now, according to Iranian leadership, will not negotiate with the United States until the end of Donald Trump's term. That brings us to 2029 to get some kind of a resolution to the strait reformers issue, which is, of course, something that the U.S. is the primary military representative for, essentially, the rest of the world, the global trade system, and say what you will about the U.S.'s ability and success in representing those interests, but it's ostensibly what the U.S. seeks to do, and it doesn't seem as if the U.S. is willing to back away from the Middle East entirely and just cede this to Iran. So, up until 2029, according to Iranian leadership, we are now in a holding pattern where we can just wait for Trump to leave office. So, what do you make of that? How serious do you believe that threat to be, if at all? And where do we go from here? Yeah, it's part of this broader push. So you can see the reformist camp inside of Iran has been actually trying to encourage negotiations to be ongoing between two sides. And the reformist camp has just been absolutely sidelined ever since Operation Epic Fury really took out many senior Iranian leadership that have been consistently replaced with very pro-IRGC and IRGC members themselves. So when it comes to this new Supreme National Security Council secretary, he has been he was one of the main people who are pushing to extend this through 2029 as needed. Now, something that is a genuine question mark is to if Iran is perhaps biting off more than it can chew when it comes to such an enormous delay, they have functioned for many years under intense international sanctions, which gives them the confidence to think that they could do this. But there's a big difference between 2024 sanctions and the current blockade, because even during the sanctions back prior to this war, they were still able to export considerable amounts of oil, albeit through their shadow fleet. So it wasn't quite at market value, but it was still a considerable amount of income coming in. Their currency was struggling badly, but not nowhere near as badly as it is today. So we're going to have to see where that all goes. But on this, as a guy, he has been pushing for some very intense demands for just to get them to even consider opening the strait of war moves, including a complete lifting on the of the blockade on Iran, withdrawing American military forces from around Iran, paying war reparations and the guarantee to stop attacking Tehran's allies across the Middle East, which is in addition to the MOUs 300 billion for reconstruction. Yeah, on the Iranian declaration that they're not going to negotiate with the US, I do sense that possibly Iran has overplayed its hand a bit. Like you say, that is a long time to be stuck in this dynamic, especially with the US still barreling down on it. If you think about the US having, you know, three years to work, essentially three and a bit, or sorry, two and a bit. That is a lot of time to expect that the US military is not going to build its stockpiles in different ways, going to create new different options for itself to gain some kind of leverage. It's a long time to be bidding against American military industry. It's just the US is very good at recovering lost advantages in these like longer term battles where it really just comes down to hardware, troop availability, tactics, those kind of things. That is to say, the US, I think, could and it's definitely been the responsibility for telling me, while we're talking about smartphones, Thank you. spend the next two and a half years finding ways to justify to itself that, you know, a little push here, a little push there will be enough to push Iran over the edge, as we've seen be the philosophy for the last little while, right? And Iran may just be kind of committing to sit and wait and allow that to happen for a few years, which does not seem to me like a winning military strategy. Now, that being said, my read on this, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I think we, you know, we both are fairly keyed into US politics. I would say that it's very, very unlikely that a successor administration would deepen this war in any ways that Trump hasn't, right? I think coming in and taking over this Iran issue, maybe you continue the blockade, maybe you don't. Certainly you don't escalate from a political sense, right? Well, what's your take on that? Yeah, I don't think there's any appetite with anyone, including Trump himself to escalate this, which is sort of the problem for Trump, because, like, what are his other options at this point? But given just the total, like, zero support for further escalations in the conflict, I don't see any successive president taking further action here. But I also am not sold on the idea that, like, Iran, I think what they're thinking is that the next president would be more willing to make concessions. But once when you look at the MOU that was signed earlier this year, I can't imagine the successive administration making even more concessions, especially when it comes to freedom of shipping in Hormuz, given the US longtime stance that toll-free shipping must be protected. Again, we sent the US Navy during the Iran-Iraq war to escort Kuwaiti ships, re-flag and escort Kuwaiti ships through the strait that had been coming under fire from Iran. So this is a long-standing bipartisan thing. And I don't see that going away. I have to imagine the blockade is sort of the option that both sides would be able to maintain until Iran lets go at least a bit on its insistence on tolls. Recently, they came out with a proposal, and we can get into the negotiations between Oman and Iran that our good friend Wilfred is trying to tilt the scales on here. So overall, right now, the rumors have it that Iran is pushing for 7% of any ship's cargo value, which is a hefty toll. Original ones had been looking at like 2%. So I mean, this is a mighty heavy fee to be charging. And if Iran does control this strait long term, anytime something happens, they can just jack up those tolls. And like, what is the alternative? You know, I mean, it's like, if the US can't... if the u.s concedes to iran okay we cannot get you to open hormones they will be they will forever own this thing they will be able to do whatever they want for the rest of our life when it comes to tolling in the in the book in this body of water absolutely and i wonder if part of it is just getting the u.s to delay long enough that by the time somebody else comes into office it kind of is a status quo right like it's it's just kind of a fundamental assumption of that presidency and of the world moving forward rather than what it is now which is a new invention geopolitically speaking that iran would be able to exert this control consistently i also do wonder how much of this delaying strategy is meant to get somebody just who is frankly more willing to stick to a deal right trump clearly loves to think of himself as this great deal maker he also is the guy who bombed iran mid-negotiation you know he is also the guy who threw out the jcpoa like he has a proven history of not really respecting the deals that he himself made or that the american government made with iran in the past and i do wonder how much of this is a matter of just like iran can't trust trump to follow this deal at all even if it is agreed even if the original mou were agreed with all points all these concessions to iran right as soon as those concessions and the fulfillment of them starts to become mildly inconvenient to trump how confident is iran that he's not going to start bombing again so do you think that there's any anything there or is this just much more of a much more focused on just delaying until kind of there's a geopolitical reset with a new american president there is trump i mean certainly is not trusted by the iranians iran is not trusted by trump either which makes for some of the hardest negotiations in the world both sides have legitimate points to raise against the other here when it comes to looking at this from a more long-term perspective i mean i just have to imagine that i mean we have seen like iran overstep itself a bit so the thing that i like to point to and i mentioned this i think last week on the pod as well that the iran had the u.s and israel alliance exactly where i mean any iranian politician would have absolutely dreamed of having it for the last four decades five decades at this point where it could say oh you want hormuz open all you have to do is just get israel to control itself in lebanon in gaza blah blah and then we'll open it up for you and that had real implications for the u.s israel alliance that was the worst we've ever seen it and it's it's since recovered because when it comes to bombing iran there's one country in the middle east who will always be up for that so u.s and israel alliance back on i guess there but they did miscalculate or at least perhaps they intentionally calculated that it wasn't worth it because they want hormuz that badly but overall i have to I imagine that's a bit of a miscalculation, because the thing I always come back to is they did not control Hormuz before this war, and they had exactly zero issue shutting it down. So they don't need long-term control over it for their national security. If they start letting shipping go through it without tolls again, and then the U.S. attacks or something, it will be able to close it again within a matter of days. So I have to imagine that we may be seeing an overplay here by Tehran. Yeah, I do wonder how much of that is about getting in front of a peacetime maritime protection mission, because there has been some talk of that. So the U.K., France, Japan, a number of other countries have signed on to this agreement where they would surge ships into the strait if a deal were to be agreed, right, and essentially lock down the strait for the foreseeable future. That obviously is a response to Iran's ability to close down the strait. That was not something that was being discussed before, and it's quite obviously a response to a very specific problem. That being said, I wonder how or whether Iran believes that its ability to shut down the strait in the future will be interrupted, I guess, by the presence of a longer-term international peace mission. Because it's one thing for Iran, despite the U.S.'s naval power, right, it's one thing for Iran to decide to consistently push back against one country with one leader that's kind of, you know, in a way making a pariah out of itself with this particular war, which was a very much a war of choice that did not need to take place, versus putting itself into a situation potentially in the future where it's now standing on the other side of a much larger multinational coalition that, regardless of how that coalition thinks about the U.S. military actions, it certainly will not have its own ships attacked, if that makes sense. Yeah, it definitely does. I think overall, I mean, it does make sense that they would be more concerned about an international force in Hormuz than just one country. But I also have to imagine, like, the U.S. presence has not been particularly effective at escorting ships. Even the one in the 80s that escorted the Kuwaiti ones, that had issues. They were only able to do a small fraction of the total pre-war shipping. And the first one hit a mine, the Bridgerton, hit a mine on its very first go. So overall, I just have to imagine that, like, their ability to launch drones along their enormous coastline of Hormuz, even if you have an enormous international coalition, it's still going to be relatively easy to close this thing down. I don't think we really have any good ways of preventing them from doing it if they so choose, which is where the blockade sort of comes back into the question. And so my biggest question is, like, does the U.S. have it in it to stick this thing out? Well, I wrote a few months ago. a more recent take that's basically like an updated one yeah may 7th on france i wrote an article operation economic fury is squeezing iran will washington see it through well the answer to that was no and now i'm sort of in the position where i wrote the article the u.s has one last option in iran and no don't worry this was not anything involving any major escalations even though that title did sound a bit escalatory there but it's just advocating for a maintaining of the blockade because if the u.s does let go of hormuz now and establish iranian domination of it this is just going to permanently be a massive issue and we're already seeing that when it comes to the babo mendeb the straight off of the coast of yemen which iranian diplomats are in sana as we speak orchestrating with the houthis and basically giving them a how-to guide on how to set up a tolling booth along that street yeah as we think more about evolving iranian strategy what do you make of this new guy who has come in to head the iranian national security council so you interrupted him a bit at the top of the episode but can you tell us a little bit more about his approach to all of this and then also right this is not you know this is not the supreme leader this is not the head of the irgc how much does this guy's opinion really matter going forward yeah so well first off given just the fact that we still have zero proof of life on most tada harmony we did see they tried to put out this like video of him over the weekend i think that ended up being a video from that was already released from march so we still have zero proof of life really on this guy being alive so that escalates the role of the lower levels even more and all of them are trending in a very hard line direction so when it comes to most and reza he has just been he was a founding member of the irgc and he has been a very extreme figure in the regime for years he ran for president unsuccessfully a few years ago but was just considered to be so far in the like pro-conservative direction that he was he did not win but he's also wanted in argentina for the attack in 1994 he's been wanted there since 2006 i believe that killed dozens of people including the amia jewish community center as well as the embassy there so certainly not somebody who's exactly looking for a peace deal yeah and then so like you say we really haven't had proof of life on most of a committee there was some discussion in the past we you know leaked iranian anonymous sources take them as you will that he had some kind of like critical health crisis all of that is kind of presupposing that there is this guy who is still alive and so on so forth and that this isn't hope we can have any situation. Whether it is or whether it isn't, though, most of it clearly is not issuing the sorts of commands that would allow day-to-day governance of Iran. So how important is this guy for the military trajectory that Iran is taking? Or is he representative of just kind of a larger trend that he just kind of slots in with? Yeah, it's sort of, I mean, he is going to play an outsized role. It's more important than just some random staffer, given that he oversees the highest body that deals with Iranian security matters and foreign policy on this type of stuff. But I think it's also just indicative of the direction that the country's headed in, where all of the reformists have been sidelined. So Masoud Pizeshkian, the president, reportedly even offered his resignation to Supreme Leader Mustafa Khomeini earlier this year, which was rejected just because of how sidelined Pizeshkian has consistently felt throughout this whole thing, where he basically feels like he can't do anything, he can't be president here. So overall, I'm not optimistic on that front. And that leaves the Iranian people in just the worst possible situation, because they're obviously at the receiving end of the impact of sanctions and all of this that's going on. And that's more impactful than ever. Meanwhile, they have a regime that's more willing to subjugate them to the most extreme sanctions than has ever been seen in the Islamic Republic's history. Because at least previous administrations, including Pizeshkian himself, has at least sympathized with, OK, this blockade is having really bad impacts on the economy. We can't run this thing like this forever. Whereas the IRGC is outright saying, sure, 2029, sign us up. We'll wait. Yeah. And it's not so much that the people who ordered those massacres of protesters earlier this year are the same people. People leading Iran now, most of the people who ordered those directly are dead and were dead from the earlier days of this conflict. That being said, this war has elevated so many of the people from the apparatus that allowed those massacres to take place. And that is not, that is not unforeseeable. That is not an accident. It is not a surprise that taking this course of action against Iran, right, decapitation and just kind of hoping that things would change when you're decapitating the top of a very, very, very robust military chain of command that always had very deep and heavy political influence, right? The idea that you can just decapitate that and not expect military chains of command to update themselves faster than a civilian governance process would, right? The reason why Pazeski and all these other moderates are not in control of Iran is because when you decapitate a country's leadership, there is a sprint that happens to determine who gets to take over and the IRGC and it's, it's, it's associated. allies all over the Iranian leadership were in such a better position to do that because they had the chains of command. They knew who was going to step in for who and who would step in for them after that and who takes over that. They can see when somebody else leaves to go up and so on and so forth. The idea that Iran's civil leadership, its moderates, would just win that sprint somehow when they're at such a systemic disadvantage within the Iranian state was just lunacy, I think, at least. Yeah, I mean, it certainly hasn't worked out well at all. I have been routinely shocked by the, more than just the regime aspect, just the total lack of preparation in terms of the counter-drone warfare approach because when it comes to attacking Iran, Evan, I seriously think if the two of us sat down with zero access to classified intel, minus whatever Wilfred is going to be sending us from the Imani side, then I sincerely believe the three of us would be able to bang out a more coherent war strategy than the U.S. did. Because the two most obvious things when it comes to attacking Iran, first, they're going to close Hormuz. Now, this was stipulated. I mean, this obviously was going to happen. So it didn't surprise me when it did. I just, I had imagined that there would be a plan of any sort to get this thing flowing again. And the only people surprised was the Trump administration. Exactly. And then more broadly speaking, I mean, the number one method that Iran is going to use, they are not known for having the greatest Navy. You know, they are not known for their Air Force. They are known for their drones. They have a lot of them. They work very well. And we had absolutely no strategy to intercept these things using anything other than the world's most expensive interceptor systems that were not designed for these. And now, surprise, surprise, we're like dangerously low on munitions. I never in a million years would have thought that we would be in a situation where like the most obvious method of attack would be something that apparently hadn't even crossed the minds of the people who drew up this war. I think they were, they went into it assuming that a decapitation strike would inherently lead to massive concessions, which, you know, I mean, that's one, that's one thing. I'm not even faulting them for thinking that though. We can certainly get into it, but the lack of backup plans, like if that doesn't work, then what the hell are we going to do? And we apparently nothing. I mean, it's just like insanity to me. Yeah. We, I mean, we're both Americans. We both grew up kind of with the American culture, where the military is featured fairly prominently. I think the, this administration in particular really falls into this trap that a lot have in the past, but you know, it's, it's at an extreme level now. So you This is the most powerful military on Earth by a wide margin. It is the most experienced military on Earth by a wide margin other than now, recently, Russia and Ukraine because of their war. Prior to that, the U.S. had it over the last few decades. That being said, there is this false equivalency that's made between this is the strongest military in the world and this military can solve any challenge. One of those things is very true. The other one is not. There are challenges in this world that no military is equipped to solve. Dealing with massive barrages of missiles and drones just off the coast of Iran is one of those problems that militaries have not designed themselves to deal with that in a way that is cost effective, that is a way that is long-term sustainable, that distributes its own assets in a way that ensures that millions and millions of dollars caught up in a single war. A warship can't be sunk, for example, or a single war plane can't be brought down. The idea that the U.S. military is very strong is obviously true. The idea that the U.S. military is a purpose-built machine for every purpose just reflects a real lack of understanding of the challenges of modern warfare, and it doesn't seem as if the current U.S. administration had any appreciation for that before. And frankly, it doesn't seem like they're building an appreciation in the way that I would want to see. Just personally, just personally, as a concerned citizen, you know, you would hope there's lessons learned from this. There don't really seem to be in that way. Yeah, I think so. Like right now, we are the worst at drones that we will ever be again. So we are ramping up slowly on this stuff. We have seen some intelligence come out of the army where they had 400 interceptors of like actual counter drone strikes that were used. But they were only starting to buy significant numbers of these a week after Epic Fury launched, which brings me back to my original point. But so I think it's just moving way too slow. But the whole like Pete Hegsus's whole thing was military readiness, military readiness, all of this stuff, even Donald Trump, peace through strength. OK, I mean, we have been because of the interceptor shortage that we have, as well as like the attack systems, we have been left ruinously unprepared for the next conflict. Because of this just total lack of strategic thinking. And we've already seen we've already had to pull Patriot Interceptors out of South Korea. I mean, we are so much more vulnerable to something elsewhere in the world than we were before. And I do think that the fact that this is all out in the public now, I mean, everybody knows this. And I can assure you that every hostile government to the United States across the world knows that we're low. So, I mean, if there's ever a time to try. something it's now because the u.s is just like fundamentally we have limited numbers of munitions and we've expended so many of them over the last year we burned through 25 of our entire thad interceptor stock during the 12-day war last summer alone and that was before the this epic fury kicked off so i mean it's it's pretty ugly that's right and we see sometimes on our own episodes right we see people down in the comments talking about like you know how can you give all this information away it's weird that warfront's putting all this information away so that you know iran can see all of this data put together i want to be so clear to anybody watching who this might not be clear to everything that we share is publicly sourced publicly available was published by major outlets prior to it being aggregated by us we aggregate data we do not present data that is you know hidden behind classified barriers that was only revealed to us when we were supposed to no none of that the idea that any minimally competent global intelligence agency would not have such a clearer picture of this already than what we've even been able to present because we are reliant on the public domain we are reliant on what's published these people these institutions are not the idea that the u.s could just go in and expend such a high share of its of its interceptor stockpiles of its weapon stockpiles start shifting around equipment start placing procurement orders so on so forth the idea that they could do all of that and global intelligence agencies would not be able to form a very clear picture of what had happened and what the u.s still has is i it just it speaks to again a level of a lack of awareness that is really stunning to me yeah overall i mean so there was a long-standing myth sort of a dispute over the impact of trump on foreign policy so on the one hand people would argue that he was too erratic and that was a huge detriment and on the other hand trump argued that this was an inherent strength because and he did have some things to point to on that in fairness because he would say he would point to for example in turn his first term soleimani okay so he was not pure isolationist by any means he was a he did orchestrate a strike i was in the middle east when that happened by the way that was it was a little nerve-wracking so one of iran's top generals qasim soleimani was taken out in early 2020 and it was a big deal it was a very big deal it was signaling the u.s was not shy about fighting but the concern here being that okay he might be up for very limited short-term strikes but does he have what it takes if push comes to shove to really see it out that's been the concern and i think we this war has really sort of answered that he's very willing to do you short-term things but if push does come to shove i don't know so that's my that's another big concern i have if we cancel this blockade early it's going to be signaling to everybody all you have to do is make this maximally painful for the united states economically speaking and we just fold so that's i mean it's that's another reason i think just maintaining it is just critical not just to our own u.s interest but for global stuff as well because if we do just cancel this and pull out the implications for europe in terms of russia asia as for their threats as well i mean this is going to be something that is transformative in and i do not mean that in a positive way no i completely agree i look at russia looking to potentially push into the baltics push into whether it's it's above the arctic or wherever it is but to test the nato alliance i think of china's ambitions toward taiwan toward the philippines toward other other states in the region it does seem as if there is a window now for as you say about two and a half years for the rest of the world to have a very clear set of operating parameters if they were to engage in aggression against other other nations it's not to say that they have a free pass to it and there will be absolutely no consequences but it is to say that again like you said that the u.s has made it patently obvious that under this administration if you can create and apply economic effort leverage economic pressure you can place american service members at risk that the u.s just does not have the political appetite to engage in any full-scale conflict at all at all because if the u.s is not willing to go to these lengths after an entirely voluntary military operation that trump himself cooked up and decided that he wanted to have done right if he's not willing to go to these lengths for his own pet project what lengths will he be willing to go to when he's drawn into somebody else's war to defend somebody else's soil in a way that he never asked for in a way that his administration never tried to prompt i think about like estonia or latvia you know i know we diverge on this i would be stunned if trump just honored nato's article 5 as written with no attempt to hold back no attempt to send less than was necessary no attempt to try and push off responsibility onto european allies so on so forth i would be stunned if trump were to just follow as written u.s policy on that we diverge sorry well just to say that's true for taiwan that's true for the philippines that's true for many nations around the world i would be very surprised if trump were to react to those situations in a way other than quite frankly trying to wiggle his way out of the u.s's international commitments we diverge less now than we did previously based off of the performance of this war just to play devil's advocate though so like the previous thinking would have been that and i think there could still be some truth to this i'm not like fully fully sold on at least some of it because give it the fact that this was a war of choice almost makes it a different category in that you know we did this foolish thing and now there's two options right we could maintain the status quo blockade and as long as needed even though it's going to be expensive even though this needed not to have happened etc or we could just pull out and cancel the whole thing and try to move on but even if we do that second option which i think would be a terrible message to the international community for all sorts of reasons there still is a categorical difference between that being a war of choice that we just sort of opt out of rather than an act of outright aggression or an even outright invasion by a foreign force that forces us into something where we either blink or shoot back and so i think that i personally like now i'm especially given the lack of munitions that the military is facing i would be severely concerned about our ability to intercept a lot of what russia would be shooting at it or shooting if it was to move on eastern europe but i also have to imagine that you know i mean you that would finish trump in a way that would be very difficult for me to see him going at because he would have much more domestic support as well as much more criticism for not defending these these allies in a way that he really hasn't faced domestically on just criticizing nato if that makes sense it does i worry that partly i worry that public opinion and backlash and all that is not a sufficient deterrent to trump i think if we bring in some domestic politics stuff like you know nobody in the u.s i think at this point really is with trump on the reflecting pool thing for example it's a little petty issue but i think it is emblematic of like these fights that trump picks and then sticks really hard to we can think about the fund for the j6ers that had to be canceled for todd blanche to go through that would have essentially paid out a lot of people who were part of the capital riots back in 2021 i think partially we've seen a willingness for trump to really dig his heels in on roundly unpopular positions when he believes that they serve his own interests and then beyond that i do worry that this administration so many of its decisions whether it's in iran whether it's in other conflict zones around the world whether it is in domestic deal making whether it is in the trump family's use of its political leverage to accumulate quite a bit of wealth everything seems to begin and end itself interest these days I don't know. and for that reason, I really am concerned that if Trump wouldn't do it in a war of choice, he wouldn't do it at all. You know, I hear what you're saying insofar as Trump would take a massive hit by failing to defend, let's say, Estonia. I also worry that he may make the calculus that most of the people who were going to be alienated by that have already been alienated to a degree, and that at this point, what is there to lose, really? Because he's been banging on about the European lack of commitment to security for years and years and years. It's easy enough to say, this should have been Europe's issue all along. They didn't take care of Estonia when they could have. They didn't step up when they could have. Now it's too late. They got themselves into this. I'm not going to come in and save their asses, right? It's when that's such an easy play to make and the only repercussion, really, other than the long-term geostrategic catastrophe that would be, that is not going to be Trump's problem because, again, two and a half years and that he's done. Other than that, I really worry that there's just not enough there to entice him to believe that it's within his own interest to guarantee and honor U.S. security commitments. Yeah. I mean, in terms of wording it, like in terms of honoring security commitments, I do agree with you on that because when these things are raised in that framing, he will always come out and be like, you know, Europe needs to pull it down, blah, blah, blah. But in terms of his own legacy, he cares a lot about that. I mean, he's very, very sensitive to his image in media. He's very willing to lash out over negative coverage, all of these types of things. I have a hard time imagining him if push really comes to shove with Russia expanding beyond Ukraine, just doing nothing. But I am more on your side now than I was a few months ago. I will admit that. Yeah. No, I hope you're right. And it's enough to kind of push him back to some kind of action there. But yeah, it's difficult to keep the faith these days. One other thing I do just want to add is, so one of our very first conversations was about the tolls in Hormuz that I don't think either of us envisioned going on this long. So it's a sort of, it was a sort of similar divergence between us where I was saying the U.S. was going to really stick out the tolls because they would not accept. And we still don't know where that's ultimately going to settle. And it may be 2029 before we finally get a verdict on that. But I think that we're in this interesting situation where we were both right in like the worst possible ways, because you are absolutely right that Iran massively pushed for this and has been able to maintain this leverage over Hormuz in a way that I foolishly thought that the U.S. would have had some form of plan, you know, but I mean, we can, I've already ranted about Hegseth and whatnot enough to... Thank you. the power waging this war would come in with some degree of a plan exactly but overall what i will say is the u.s has not backed out of that yet i mean we're still we're going on six months of this thing specifically because of tolls and hormones so i like it has been a reluctance to escalate beyond what he wanted this war of choice to be but at the same time it's also not something where it's like just complete total concessions even though that mou was like one of the most shocking things in my entire professional career that i have ever seen yeah that document was stunning it was truly stunning something that's important to keep in mind which is like for everything else he does trump does love to delay you know if there is a way to delay and eventuality without necessarily suffering the consequences right up front he will do that and in a way that can be helpful that can be advantageous it also is a way it's something that can be leveraged against the u.s by an adversary who knows how to work with it but it's not always a bad thing like it is it can be good to buy time it does like the more time you buy the longer you have to wait before the negative outcomes hit right and there is something to be set for that there's something to be set for waiting until the situation can change will it change in this case i don't know i would be very surprised if something came along that was big enough at this point to change iran's thinking but who knows you know there's there are worse things to do than divide one's time but yeah i think overall it's it's kind of a discouraging situation if we really look at it closely yeah i do want to push off to a new topic also related to the negotiations and i know you have a lot of thoughts on this but the kind of the nuclear only approach that the u.s has stuck to with iran for decades and decades right now that we're seeing this conflict be decided around the control of the strait of hormuz rather than nuclear weapons right as we've seen iranian leaders kind of come up and say no strait control is more valuable to us in many ways than a nuclear program than a nuclear weapon what do you one what do you make of the legacy of this negotiating approach from the u.s and how that's gotten us to the situation and then how do you see the changes in that in that area playing out yeah i almost have to wonder that it just like how much of this was like cold war hangover thinking because i like for what it's worth i would be severely concerned about iran having a nuclear weapon but at the same time the barrier of entry of using that like the entire world if this actually got used this would be a fundamentally different war in which the islamic republic would not still be standing at the end of it if it was using nuclear weapons it would turn the entire world it would get people who are currently on the sidelines not on the sidelines anymore in a way that would be hard to overstate so it would it from iran's perspective they wanted it as deterrence not as something to actively be going around nuking the middle east so on that front the chance of them actually using it was much lower than the actual methods that they are using so when it comes to their more actively used approaches the first one i'll point to being their proxy forces they are king of proxies throughout the region and successive u.s administrations i'm not going to say have ignored it because obviously they paid attention to hezbollah as well as a few others but they really haven't prioritized it nearly as much as the nuclear file so where whereas you saw with pat and this is totally bipartisan too it was a very nuclear first to the point of being nuclear only and the criticism of the jcpoa was that it was nuclear only but again this is sort of the result of like the cold war thinking where these the nuclear weapons above and beyond all else well okay iran it's sort of up to iran at this point if it wants a nuclear weapon to be honest because of how poorly this war has gone but i ultimately think like they are correct when it comes to hormuz as well as their proxy forces especially in yemen with the babal mendeb being more impactful or perhaps equally impactful i should say in terms of deterrence against future attacks that a nuclear weapon would have served the reason that iran has never been attacked by a major power since at least since in the post-war era has been precisely this they were going to go for hormuz which again is that's why i thought there was going to be some grand strategy here but that aside there that was the go-to leverage that they would be able to pull and it's it certainly had a lot of impact and i think that our lack of focus on those things especially so like their drone program they had been developing this for years and years and really got good at it not just making them but making them while isolated while under sanctions through a lot of domestic production through some chinese help and then was exporting it through the caspian sea up into russia for years they built one of the biggest drone production plants alongside russia in to the north of the caspian there which has been used to attack ukraine ever since and again that just sort of flew under the radar in terms of u.s deterrence policy against iranian threats yeah the iranian military has its many problems i mean you mentioned earlier the lack of a navy the lack of an air force even before this war like iran had no meaningful air power at all very little meaningful naval power that being said iran is a world leader and has been for a long time in adaptive warfare and in highly innovative work writing. This is something that we've seen in Ukraine where we've seen with a lot of countries that are kind of on the butt end of a really difficult geopolitical situation where that, you know, the overwhelming force of the world stacked against them tends to breed new and different sorts of innovation in a way that well-entrenched, very conventional military powers struggle to give up with. So the U.S. in this case, Russia in Ukraine's case, so on. And we're seeing now the long-term repercussions of creating a situation in which this country, you know, couldn't directly challenge any other nation that was some kind of a major power, middle power, whatever it may be, just because of the sanctions, the lack of economic parity, so on and so forth, military parity. But where that country could spend decades working its way through all of the little loopholes in the system to create a new way of warfighting, it shouldn't be lost on anybody. Iran and then Ukraine as well got to modern warfare before nearly anybody else did, including the United States, in terms of the use of long-range drones, in terms of the use of short-range drones. Iran beat the U.S. in that technological race. Iran beat Russia. Iran beat China. Iran beat most countries. Iran arguably is now in at least second place because Ukraine is quite clearly in first. I think you could put Russia ahead of Iran as well. But regardless of that power scaling, Iran was able to anticipate these evolutions in warfare partially because the U.S. was so focused on this narrow negotiating framework, right, where obviously the nuclear issue was first and foremost. And there were a couple of other minor points of discussion, but that was really it. That created this very system that allowed Iran to build its military power and now leverage it. I hope that's not lost on folks listening. I hope it's not lost on a future U.S. administration that, I mean, you can't keep very, very closely to these, you know, tight, self-contained, as-written deals and expect a country like Iran not to play in the loopholes or expect any country not to play with the loopholes. It's just not realistic and it never really has been. The only thing, like, I would then ask, though, is, like, so drones self-explanatory, massive fumble by many countries. The U.S., I will say, not alone there. Israel has also been massively struggling, which, again, I fundamentally just do not understand how these guys, U.S., Israel, and others as well, did not anticipate this. I mean, Israel invaded Lebanon, is currently occupying about a fifth of the South, obviously going to be coming under Hezbollah fire, and is just, like, caught massively flat-footed against drones. They're best friends with Iran. Obviously, they're going to have some Shah heads to be firing at them. I just, I fundamentally do not understand how these guys did not anticipate this. But it seems to have been just this collective... amnesia that everybody was like i'm sure that won't be a problem yeah i would bet every penny that i have that ground commanders knew soldiers knew unit commanders knew the military chain of command knew understood all of this very well for quite a while there is also an economic incentive that kind of comes over the top of everything where you know if you want to retool your military to fight a drone war you now have to tell lockheed martin that they're out of a lot of money and you have to deal with the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of congress people and senators who are really enjoying their lobbying relationship with lockheed martin and you need to get that through the congress you need to get it through the courts because there will be quite a few legal challenges to come down you need to build these procurement pipelines that operate with new companies that the u.s doesn't know how to do business with because the u.s has worked with defense majors you know rtx lockheed northrop grumman general dynamics general atomics a very small subset of companies for quite a few years there is an institutional rigidity there that actively works against the interests of militaries of their troops of the people that they are sworn to protect that is not a i mean obviously at times it can be a very good relationship right lockheed brought the u.s the f-35 thank you lockheed martin right that's a very meaningful defense contribution at the same time the overwhelming pressure of these defense majors has gone a very long way in preventing the u.s from adapting in the way that it should have been doing for a very long time so you know if if that circle doesn't square it's because the military industrial economics of it don't really work out in a way that favors innovation or favors adaptation so much as it favors the consistent rewarding of defense majors who have already gotten very powerful unfortunately and we've already seen this by the way so trump has been floating leasing patriots to be manufactured by ukraine but it's basically stalled at this point which is sort of shocking to me because of how short we are on this we had talked about this briefly last week but it hasn't gone anywhere because the defense contractors are nervous about leasing this out to a foreign country now i said last week that i am very much pro ukraine building these things because we're in just absolute shortage central here but to play devil's advocate at least what the contractors here are saying is look this is very critical stuff to the united states interests and giving it to a foreign power who's currently at or with somebody very hostile to u.s interests risks that is a national security risk essentially do you see that as in as like any sense of legitimate or not really so that's a very good question I will say the latest reports that I've seen, these are citing anonymous sources, so take it for what is worth, but the latest that I'm seeing are more along the lines of that the PAC-3 producers in the U.S. are trying to stonewall that deal because they fear that once Ukraine has access to those designs, Ukraine is going to innovate something better and cheaper, which is something that we've seen before several times over in this war. Right, Ukraine is building, you know, not necessarily technologically better systems, but the cost to effect ratio basically, right, the low price that you have to pay for all the features that you get is so much better in these Ukrainian design centers than the U.S. ones. So take that with a grain of salt, take it for what it's worth, you know, don't treat that as costful. But going to your broader question, is that a legitimate concern? It certainly is, right? You don't want the, like, you don't want a new weapon system to be captured by an adversary. That being said, the U.S. has fought this war in Iran for how long now? I would be shocked if Iran hadn't gotten its hands on a single interceptor. That would be a real surprise to me. Also, quite frankly, it is a risk, but the idea that you would just stop production of these, these interceptors because of that risk kind of goes back to that same idea I mentioned earlier of like, you know, the conflation of the U.S. being a very powerful military versus the U.S. being a military that can solve every problem, right? You can try to minimize and mitigate risks in warfare. You're also engaging in warfare. There is no option that does not include substantial risk. So really it's, the question is, right, does it matter more to you to protect those trade secrets, to protect the interceptors? There's interceptors, by the way, that could not be fired from, say, Russia's or China's systems, that Russia would have to get its hands on a launch vehicle, replicate that in order to launch it, or have to spend years and years in R&D to try and figure out how to launch these things, by which point the U.S. will have innovated past that, right? Is the idea of avoiding that worth more to you than having ballistic missiles drop on U.S. bases in the Middle East or drop on desalination plants or oil refineries or LNG facilities or whatever it is, right? Personally, I think the risk to reward is very heavily skewed to the idea that not only Ukraine, but the Gulf states should be making these. They have the money. They have the spare military industrial capacity. They have, quite frankly, a nearly infinite pool of, of foreign workers to draw upon that they can just pay as needed and slot into their system where they see fit. But I, quite frankly, think they should be expanded across Europe, across the Middle East, across Asia, to the extent that it's possible, not just Ukraine, and not just with interceptors, but with drones, with a whole wide range of things. So, yeah, I mean, you can make your risk assessment and come to the conclusion that it's better to avoid doing that in order to protect, to protect the technical aspects on sovereign defense equipment. And I personally believe that the risk to reward ratio on that has gone way, way past. the threshold where you would need to change your line of thinking yeah in general i am just wildly in favor of getting more of these things being produced so in terms of other countries i certainly welcoming of them to be building them south korea has been making moves on this apparently and i would the fact the fact that like the u.s was like solely responsible or not entirely solely but largely responsible for the production of this interceptor system that defends like so much of the world is just something that i don't think ever really should have happened one country just fundamentally cannot be no country has the resources to be putting out stuff like this even if they are making profit and certainly it was profitable to be manufacturing these and selling these but it just fundamentally does not work i mean what given how important that these interceptor systems are we're in this world now where the expectation of firing missiles big missiles at large population centers is that okay if you shoot 100 maybe two of them get through you know i mean it's not mass devastation in the way that it used to be but that prior world where it is mass devastation comes back real fast the second you run out of interceptors and we're already seeing this in ukraine where the lack of interceptors for conventional missiles has been something that putin is increasingly more than happy to exploit so the lack of stockpile here is i would say like national emergency level or honestly international emergency level i agree it should be treated as such now the unfortunate thing and i hate to bring it back to the industrial side of it is you know we look back at the invasion of ukraine in 2022 as kind of a turning point with the world realized that these post-cold war ideas about like major war just not being really a possibility in the world anymore and that we were all going to be held together by international law and international organizations and this like globally integrated financial system that was going to make it really difficult for countries to be ostracized right we think back in the 2022 invasion as like the moment that all went out the window that's not really true 2022 2023 most of 2024 was still kind of this period where even if it seemed obvious where things were headed a lot of very important people in the defense world and in the in the world of european and indo-pacific governments were all kind of in this same headspace of like can we put this genie back in the bottle at some point at this point it is very obvious that's not what's going to happen the world has changed in a way that is really irrevocable that also is something that started to really become clear in 2024 and 2025 not least because of the actions of donald trump right not so much to you know engage in a full-scale invasion of ukraine attack on another country per se, right? You can talk about Venezuela, you can talk about Iran, so on and so forth, Cuba. But certainly Trump hasn't done anything remotely or something like that. But what Trump did do is essentially dismantle a lot of the international and geopolitical backup systems that world leaders were still, I think, quite frankly, deluding themselves into believing we're still going to matter at some point. And I say all of this to say, right? The realization that we are headed into a new and more conflict-interested world, if you will, is a new realization as of the last couple of years. If that, say two years, that might be an overestimation. And all of these defense decisions don't make any sense if you are preparing for a world in which war is a possibility. But to have the U.S. be the sole producer of so many different kinds of military equipment makes all the sense in the world for U.S. defense majors, if you're going to sell showpiece militaries, showpiece hardware, that the expectation is that they're never going to have to use. And that has been the fundamental assumption of our world for a very long time, in a way that we are only now starting to pay for, and I expect that we will for some time. Yeah, I think overall, this has sort of unmasked a truth that was underlying the world order that many people just sort of assumed was not the case. So when it comes to, like, what I would say is that even just the talk about taking Greenland was massively impactful to this because it really shook Europe as to, you know, even though it didn't happen, and I'm not really necessarily sure how serious of a threat it actually was. But nevertheless, it was, I mean, Europe was, like, staring down the barrel of a potential U.S. invasion again. So, I mean, like, that really is a fundamental game changer. Now, when it comes to the impact of Trump himself, what I would say is he has accelerated it, but it has, it is a result of faulty assumptions that regardless of if it was Trump or not, this whole thing was already sort of in the process of being exposed through, as we could see, 2022 with Ukraine. The fact that they were, that many were able to put that off as not being the deathbed of the international rules-based order, if you will, is only a product of the fact that there was enough rhetorical consensus in certain capitals that it was still a thing. So, I mean, even if you had countries that operated outside of it was this, it's this sort of almost construct, if you will, where people, as long as enough leaders of enough powerful countries opt into it, and this sort of gets into a debate about, like, what is reality? But if enough people convince each other that it is real, then it almost becomes real itself. So for many years, the world was able to proceed along those lines. And so, for example, when you had Iran attacking Kuwaiti ships in the Strait of Hormuz, then the international community said, this can't happen, sailed in, and re-flagged them and escorted them along. But ultimately, as more and more countries were not willing to participate in that, it really just started to fall apart. And so in some other timeline where, I don't know, either Trump was not elected in 2016 or Kamala won in 2024 or something like that, I'm nowhere near convinced that any of this would have inevitably been avoided. I would have seen it just playing out in certainly different ways. Obviously, Kamala would not be invading or threatening to invade Greenland, but I would see it playing out differently. No, I fully agree. I do believe that the world was headed here anyway. I think there's a difference between kind of like blowing over the House of Cards with like a light breeze and taking a flamethrower to it. And I think Trump is kind of now on the flamethrower route. Well, that being said, right, we talk a lot about the wars that happened around the world. We have no way of talking about the wars that didn't happen. We have no way of knowing where the world would have gone, how much better, how much worse it would have been in various ways. I do think that there were a small group of possibilities that it would have been nice to still have where the world could find a way to kind of come around to this new reality without so many disruptive shocks and so much death and so much war. And without setting the conditions for a much longer, years long phase of conflict that we now seem to be headed into. That being said, even though I think we may have sacrificed some of the best case outcomes in that sense, I don't know. Like, obviously, we can't know. Right. But I would suspect that we're not necessarily headed to a worst case scenario here. I think the way that this wake up call came in was not the way that most folks would want it. And that's OK, because we got the wake up call. And what we do with it now, I think the world is starting to react in ways that are certainly more encouraging than they used to be. And we don't know what great catastrophe would have been befallen a world in which most of the world didn't wake up to this until it was much too late. And we don't know what would happen in that world. We know that the world now is waking up to it. And I think there is something to say for that. Yeah, I had a professor in college. This was shortly before the war in Ukraine, who was just enormously convinced that the fall of the liberal international order was essentially exclusively the fault of the election of Trump. And seemed to take this approach where as long. long as you can keep him get him out of office and keep him out of office that we were almost just like magically going to heal this thing and i just have this way i mean my freshman year of college i was i was talking to this guy and i'm like you know i'm obviously being polite because this guy ultimately decides my grades but i'm thinking to myself how does he think this like what in what world does this just like go back to the 1990s you know yeah no trump is you know to the extent that he's a disruptive force and geopolitically speaking you know he is he is yet another symptom of many much larger problems there is a reason that the u.s was so willing and ready to hear this guy not once but twice there is a reason that trump has been able to do all that he has in again in iran and venezuela in the threats over greenland right the idea that trump could come in and do what he has done is not to say that he you know found some way to make the old world disappear he seems to have had a very keen understanding of the old world in a way that a lot of people who were architects of that world really didn't and you know you can say what you want about that but it seems as if we are at least a little bit more honest with each other than we used to be and that's what i value above all else like the clarity on that is so important because a good bad indifferent i mean this stuff is like so important to get right and when it comes to the underlying implications and undermining underlying realities there that is just so important to see clearly absolutely and at this point in the episode unfortunately we are running up against the limitations of our time allotment for the middle east round table which is a little bit more global geostrategic round table this week than it has been in the past but that's all right you know a little bit of a little bit of interesting content on what has been knock on wood a relatively slow kinetic week we'll see how long that holds up so before we finish up today what else around the region are you tracking and what should people listening into this be aware of in the coming week as usual the glacial withdrawal from southern lebanon by israel we will see where that ultimately goes negotiations were basically paused last week the lebanese government government threatened to withdraw they have not fully withdrawn from the negotiation so far which i'm happy to see i do think overall that we do need some form of strategy if this thing is going to work to get out of that but we're going to have to just sort of wait and see because this has been one of the slowest rolling processes that i've seen so far and then of course on the iran front i mean iran is saying that they're not even negotiating with the united states the u.s is saying that they are so not quite sure what to make of that but the negotiations with oman is really what's going to come down to so ultimately we're just going to have to hear back from wilfrid i think the maybe some bad reception over there right now you All right. haven't heard from him yet but perhaps after the episode yeah no i think we'll we'll give him a quick little face time after this see how he's doing say hi to the sultan real quick because i'm sure he'll be in frame but yeah no in the coming week i will be watching the houthi rebels out of yemen as usual they are starting to expand their military action in a way that seems focused on saudi arabia and on the internationally recognized yemeni government that saudi arabia supports but that may expand into some larger collateral consequences across the region in addition i will be watching israel and hamas watching what happens in gaza trying to see whether or not israel really is going to stand in the way of this hamas disarmament that seems to be on the horizon and then what that means politically for netanyahu and his coalition as well so with all of that said just want to say a quick thank you to everybody who has come into enjoy the middle east round table this week enjoys maybe the wrong word you know we're talking about war and death and horrific things but who's come in to perceive and hopefully learn a little something from the round table and from myself and my dear co-host here kyle so thank you again kyle for being here with us if you are listening to this point in the podcast you are almost certainly among our premium subscribers for which we say thank you thank you thank you we could not do this without you we appreciate you very much and really truly you help us preserve our independence you help us continue to do what we do expand our team build new projects including some stuff we're going to launch pretty soon so keep attuned to that you also as of this past week will find the full and complete war fronts and home fronts backlog on fronts.co for praying subscribers so you can find all of our uploads there day by day all in one spot all for your perusal here at fronts.co so thank you again for your support if you have not subscribed yet and you stayed to this point in the podcast then by all means what are you waiting for you know get all those perks get all the premium everything that we got for you with all that said this has been evan maloney for the middle east round table here with kyle moran and we'll see you next week thank you"
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datePublished: 2026-08-14T19:00:08.000Z
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Hello and welcome to the Middle East Roundtable here at Fronts.co. This is Evan Maloney. I am here with Kyle Moran, staff writer here at Warfronts. And we have yet another big week in the Middle East. So the blockade is ongoing with Iran. The U.S. has been firing just yesterday, actually earlier yesterday, on a ship that tried to run past it. Meanwhile, Iran has been firing on vessels transiting close to the Omani route throughout the last week. So it's been an ongoing mess in the region, as usual. Meanwhile, in domestic Iranian politics, they have a new secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. This guy, Mohsen Rezai, is a very, very hard-line figure, to say the least. He replaced Mohammed Bagar Zolgahader, who used to be, or he had himself replaced, Larajani, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike earlier this year. So it's seemingly just this endless cycle of choosing an even more extreme figure. We can get into the exact details on him in a moment. But, Evan, overall, it's looking like the region is trending in the opposite direction as to what most countries' preferences would be. It does. It's one of those weeks where, you know, if no news is good news, then Middle East news is bad news. And that's where we've been stuck for a bit, and it looks like it's where we're going to be stuck for a little while longer. One housekeeping note before we move on. As you can hear, our co-host Wilford is not with us. He is currently working as the warfront's envoy to Oman to try and put a finger on the scales of this deal, see if we can kind of get some concessions for our media empire during these Iranian and Omani negotiations to see if we can get in on some straight action. Which, if we can, by the way, premium subscribers will be entitled to 1% share of all oil revenues from the strait reformers for the foreseeable future. So, congratulations in advance. We'll see if Wilford can figure that out. Now, on to more serious business, we do want to start with this big headline from Iran over the last few days, which is that Iran, as of now, according to Iranian leadership, will not negotiate with the United States until the end of Donald Trump's term. That brings us to 2029 to get some kind of a resolution to the strait reformers issue, which is, of course, something that the U.S. is the primary military representative for, essentially, the rest of the world, the global trade system, and say what you will about the U.S.'s ability and success in representing those interests, but it's ostensibly what the U.S. seeks to do, and it doesn't seem as if the U.S. is willing to back away from the Middle East entirely and just cede this to Iran. So, up until 2029, according to Iranian leadership, we are now in a holding pattern where we can just wait for Trump to leave office. So, what do you make of that? How serious do you believe that threat to be, if at all? And where do we go from here? Yeah, it's part of this broader push. So you can see the reformist camp inside of Iran has been actually trying to encourage negotiations to be ongoing between two sides. And the reformist camp has just been absolutely sidelined ever since Operation Epic Fury really took out many senior Iranian leadership that have been consistently replaced with very pro-IRGC and IRGC members themselves. So when it comes to this new Supreme National Security Council secretary, he has been he was one of the main people who are pushing to extend this through 2029 as needed. Now, something that is a genuine question mark is to if Iran is perhaps biting off more than it can chew when it comes to such an enormous delay, they have functioned for many years under intense international sanctions, which gives them the confidence to think that they could do this. But there's a big difference between 2024 sanctions and the current blockade, because even during the sanctions back prior to this war, they were still able to export considerable amounts of oil, albeit through their shadow fleet. So it wasn't quite at market value, but it was still a considerable amount of income coming in. Their currency was struggling badly, but not nowhere near as badly as it is today. So we're going to have to see where that all goes. But on this, as a guy, he has been pushing for some very intense demands for just to get them to even consider opening the strait of war moves, including a complete lifting on the of the blockade on Iran, withdrawing American military forces from around Iran, paying war reparations and the guarantee to stop attacking Tehran's allies across the Middle East, which is in addition to the MOUs 300 billion for reconstruction. Yeah, on the Iranian declaration that they're not going to negotiate with the US, I do sense that possibly Iran has overplayed its hand a bit. Like you say, that is a long time to be stuck in this dynamic, especially with the US still barreling down on it. If you think about the US having, you know, three years to work, essentially three and a bit, or sorry, two and a bit. That is a lot of time to expect that the US military is not going to build its stockpiles in different ways, going to create new different options for itself to gain some kind of leverage. It's a long time to be bidding against American military industry. It's just the US is very good at recovering lost advantages in these like longer term battles where it really just comes down to hardware, troop availability, tactics, those kind of things. That is to say, the US, I think, could and it's definitely been the responsibility for telling me, while we're talking about smartphones, Thank you. spend the next two and a half years finding ways to justify to itself that, you know, a little push here, a little push there will be enough to push Iran over the edge, as we've seen be the philosophy for the last little while, right? And Iran may just be kind of committing to sit and wait and allow that to happen for a few years, which does not seem to me like a winning military strategy. Now, that being said, my read on this, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I think we, you know, we both are fairly keyed into US politics. I would say that it's very, very unlikely that a successor administration would deepen this war in any ways that Trump hasn't, right? I think coming in and taking over this Iran issue, maybe you continue the blockade, maybe you don't. Certainly you don't escalate from a political sense, right? Well, what's your take on that? Yeah, I don't think there's any appetite with anyone, including Trump himself to escalate this, which is sort of the problem for Trump, because, like, what are his other options at this point? But given just the total, like, zero support for further escalations in the conflict, I don't see any successive president taking further action here. But I also am not sold on the idea that, like, Iran, I think what they're thinking is that the next president would be more willing to make concessions. But once when you look at the MOU that was signed earlier this year, I can't imagine the successive administration making even more concessions, especially when it comes to freedom of shipping in Hormuz, given the US longtime stance that toll-free shipping must be protected. Again, we sent the US Navy during the Iran-Iraq war to escort Kuwaiti ships, re-flag and escort Kuwaiti ships through the strait that had been coming under fire from Iran. So this is a long-standing bipartisan thing. And I don't see that going away. I have to imagine the blockade is sort of the option that both sides would be able to maintain until Iran lets go at least a bit on its insistence on tolls. Recently, they came out with a proposal, and we can get into the negotiations between Oman and Iran that our good friend Wilfred is trying to tilt the scales on here. So overall, right now, the rumors have it that Iran is pushing for 7% of any ship's cargo value, which is a hefty toll. Original ones had been looking at like 2%. So I mean, this is a mighty heavy fee to be charging. And if Iran does control this strait long term, anytime something happens, they can just jack up those tolls. And like, what is the alternative? You know, I mean, it's like, if the US can't... if the u.s concedes to iran okay we cannot get you to open hormones they will be they will forever own this thing they will be able to do whatever they want for the rest of our life when it comes to tolling in the in the book in this body of water absolutely and i wonder if part of it is just getting the u.s to delay long enough that by the time somebody else comes into office it kind of is a status quo right like it's it's just kind of a fundamental assumption of that presidency and of the world moving forward rather than what it is now which is a new invention geopolitically speaking that iran would be able to exert this control consistently i also do wonder how much of this delaying strategy is meant to get somebody just who is frankly more willing to stick to a deal right trump clearly loves to think of himself as this great deal maker he also is the guy who bombed iran mid-negotiation you know he is also the guy who threw out the jcpoa like he has a proven history of not really respecting the deals that he himself made or that the american government made with iran in the past and i do wonder how much of this is a matter of just like iran can't trust trump to follow this deal at all even if it is agreed even if the original mou were agreed with all points all these concessions to iran right as soon as those concessions and the fulfillment of them starts to become mildly inconvenient to trump how confident is iran that he's not going to start bombing again so do you think that there's any anything there or is this just much more of a much more focused on just delaying until kind of there's a geopolitical reset with a new american president there is trump i mean certainly is not trusted by the iranians iran is not trusted by trump either which makes for some of the hardest negotiations in the world both sides have legitimate points to raise against the other here when it comes to looking at this from a more long-term perspective i mean i just have to imagine that i mean we have seen like iran overstep itself a bit so the thing that i like to point to and i mentioned this i think last week on the pod as well that the iran had the u.s and israel alliance exactly where i mean any iranian politician would have absolutely dreamed of having it for the last four decades five decades at this point where it could say oh you want hormuz open all you have to do is just get israel to control itself in lebanon in gaza blah blah and then we'll open it up for you and that had real implications for the u.s israel alliance that was the worst we've ever seen it and it's it's since recovered because when it comes to bombing iran there's one country in the middle east who will always be up for that so u.s and israel alliance back on i guess there but they did miscalculate or at least perhaps they intentionally calculated that it wasn't worth it because they want hormuz that badly but overall i have to I imagine that's a bit of a miscalculation, because the thing I always come back to is they did not control Hormuz before this war, and they had exactly zero issue shutting it down. So they don't need long-term control over it for their national security. If they start letting shipping go through it without tolls again, and then the U.S. attacks or something, it will be able to close it again within a matter of days. So I have to imagine that we may be seeing an overplay here by Tehran. Yeah, I do wonder how much of that is about getting in front of a peacetime maritime protection mission, because there has been some talk of that. So the U.K., France, Japan, a number of other countries have signed on to this agreement where they would surge ships into the strait if a deal were to be agreed, right, and essentially lock down the strait for the foreseeable future. That obviously is a response to Iran's ability to close down the strait. That was not something that was being discussed before, and it's quite obviously a response to a very specific problem. That being said, I wonder how or whether Iran believes that its ability to shut down the strait in the future will be interrupted, I guess, by the presence of a longer-term international peace mission. Because it's one thing for Iran, despite the U.S.'s naval power, right, it's one thing for Iran to decide to consistently push back against one country with one leader that's kind of, you know, in a way making a pariah out of itself with this particular war, which was a very much a war of choice that did not need to take place, versus putting itself into a situation potentially in the future where it's now standing on the other side of a much larger multinational coalition that, regardless of how that coalition thinks about the U.S. military actions, it certainly will not have its own ships attacked, if that makes sense. Yeah, it definitely does. I think overall, I mean, it does make sense that they would be more concerned about an international force in Hormuz than just one country. But I also have to imagine, like, the U.S. presence has not been particularly effective at escorting ships. Even the one in the 80s that escorted the Kuwaiti ones, that had issues. They were only able to do a small fraction of the total pre-war shipping. And the first one hit a mine, the Bridgerton, hit a mine on its very first go. So overall, I just have to imagine that, like, their ability to launch drones along their enormous coastline of Hormuz, even if you have an enormous international coalition, it's still going to be relatively easy to close this thing down. I don't think we really have any good ways of preventing them from doing it if they so choose, which is where the blockade sort of comes back into the question. And so my biggest question is, like, does the U.S. have it in it to stick this thing out? Well, I wrote a few months ago. a more recent take that's basically like an updated one yeah may 7th on france i wrote an article operation economic fury is squeezing iran will washington see it through well the answer to that was no and now i'm sort of in the position where i wrote the article the u.s has one last option in iran and no don't worry this was not anything involving any major escalations even though that title did sound a bit escalatory there but it's just advocating for a maintaining of the blockade because if the u.s does let go of hormuz now and establish iranian domination of it this is just going to permanently be a massive issue and we're already seeing that when it comes to the babo mendeb the straight off of the coast of yemen which iranian diplomats are in sana as we speak orchestrating with the houthis and basically giving them a how-to guide on how to set up a tolling booth along that street yeah as we think more about evolving iranian strategy what do you make of this new guy who has come in to head the iranian national security council so you interrupted him a bit at the top of the episode but can you tell us a little bit more about his approach to all of this and then also right this is not you know this is not the supreme leader this is not the head of the irgc how much does this guy's opinion really matter going forward yeah so well first off given just the fact that we still have zero proof of life on most tada harmony we did see they tried to put out this like video of him over the weekend i think that ended up being a video from that was already released from march so we still have zero proof of life really on this guy being alive so that escalates the role of the lower levels even more and all of them are trending in a very hard line direction so when it comes to most and reza he has just been he was a founding member of the irgc and he has been a very extreme figure in the regime for years he ran for president unsuccessfully a few years ago but was just considered to be so far in the like pro-conservative direction that he was he did not win but he's also wanted in argentina for the attack in 1994 he's been wanted there since 2006 i believe that killed dozens of people including the amia jewish community center as well as the embassy there so certainly not somebody who's exactly looking for a peace deal yeah and then so like you say we really haven't had proof of life on most of a committee there was some discussion in the past we you know leaked iranian anonymous sources take them as you will that he had some kind of like critical health crisis all of that is kind of presupposing that there is this guy who is still alive and so on so forth and that this isn't hope we can have any situation. Whether it is or whether it isn't, though, most of it clearly is not issuing the sorts of commands that would allow day-to-day governance of Iran. So how important is this guy for the military trajectory that Iran is taking? Or is he representative of just kind of a larger trend that he just kind of slots in with? Yeah, it's sort of, I mean, he is going to play an outsized role. It's more important than just some random staffer, given that he oversees the highest body that deals with Iranian security matters and foreign policy on this type of stuff. But I think it's also just indicative of the direction that the country's headed in, where all of the reformists have been sidelined. So Masoud Pizeshkian, the president, reportedly even offered his resignation to Supreme Leader Mustafa Khomeini earlier this year, which was rejected just because of how sidelined Pizeshkian has consistently felt throughout this whole thing, where he basically feels like he can't do anything, he can't be president here. So overall, I'm not optimistic on that front. And that leaves the Iranian people in just the worst possible situation, because they're obviously at the receiving end of the impact of sanctions and all of this that's going on. And that's more impactful than ever. Meanwhile, they have a regime that's more willing to subjugate them to the most extreme sanctions than has ever been seen in the Islamic Republic's history. Because at least previous administrations, including Pizeshkian himself, has at least sympathized with, OK, this blockade is having really bad impacts on the economy. We can't run this thing like this forever. Whereas the IRGC is outright saying, sure, 2029, sign us up. We'll wait. Yeah. And it's not so much that the people who ordered those massacres of protesters earlier this year are the same people. People leading Iran now, most of the people who ordered those directly are dead and were dead from the earlier days of this conflict. That being said, this war has elevated so many of the people from the apparatus that allowed those massacres to take place. And that is not, that is not unforeseeable. That is not an accident. It is not a surprise that taking this course of action against Iran, right, decapitation and just kind of hoping that things would change when you're decapitating the top of a very, very, very robust military chain of command that always had very deep and heavy political influence, right? The idea that you can just decapitate that and not expect military chains of command to update themselves faster than a civilian governance process would, right? The reason why Pazeski and all these other moderates are not in control of Iran is because when you decapitate a country's leadership, there is a sprint that happens to determine who gets to take over and the IRGC and it's, it's, it's associated. allies all over the Iranian leadership were in such a better position to do that because they had the chains of command. They knew who was going to step in for who and who would step in for them after that and who takes over that. They can see when somebody else leaves to go up and so on and so forth. The idea that Iran's civil leadership, its moderates, would just win that sprint somehow when they're at such a systemic disadvantage within the Iranian state was just lunacy, I think, at least. Yeah, I mean, it certainly hasn't worked out well at all. I have been routinely shocked by the, more than just the regime aspect, just the total lack of preparation in terms of the counter-drone warfare approach because when it comes to attacking Iran, Evan, I seriously think if the two of us sat down with zero access to classified intel, minus whatever Wilfred is going to be sending us from the Imani side, then I sincerely believe the three of us would be able to bang out a more coherent war strategy than the U.S. did. Because the two most obvious things when it comes to attacking Iran, first, they're going to close Hormuz. Now, this was stipulated. I mean, this obviously was going to happen. So it didn't surprise me when it did. I just, I had imagined that there would be a plan of any sort to get this thing flowing again. And the only people surprised was the Trump administration. Exactly. And then more broadly speaking, I mean, the number one method that Iran is going to use, they are not known for having the greatest Navy. You know, they are not known for their Air Force. They are known for their drones. They have a lot of them. They work very well. And we had absolutely no strategy to intercept these things using anything other than the world's most expensive interceptor systems that were not designed for these. And now, surprise, surprise, we're like dangerously low on munitions. I never in a million years would have thought that we would be in a situation where like the most obvious method of attack would be something that apparently hadn't even crossed the minds of the people who drew up this war. I think they were, they went into it assuming that a decapitation strike would inherently lead to massive concessions, which, you know, I mean, that's one, that's one thing. I'm not even faulting them for thinking that though. We can certainly get into it, but the lack of backup plans, like if that doesn't work, then what the hell are we going to do? And we apparently nothing. I mean, it's just like insanity to me. Yeah. We, I mean, we're both Americans. We both grew up kind of with the American culture, where the military is featured fairly prominently. I think the, this administration in particular really falls into this trap that a lot have in the past, but you know, it's, it's at an extreme level now. So you This is the most powerful military on Earth by a wide margin. It is the most experienced military on Earth by a wide margin other than now, recently, Russia and Ukraine because of their war. Prior to that, the U.S. had it over the last few decades. That being said, there is this false equivalency that's made between this is the strongest military in the world and this military can solve any challenge. One of those things is very true. The other one is not. There are challenges in this world that no military is equipped to solve. Dealing with massive barrages of missiles and drones just off the coast of Iran is one of those problems that militaries have not designed themselves to deal with that in a way that is cost effective, that is a way that is long-term sustainable, that distributes its own assets in a way that ensures that millions and millions of dollars caught up in a single war. A warship can't be sunk, for example, or a single war plane can't be brought down. The idea that the U.S. military is very strong is obviously true. The idea that the U.S. military is a purpose-built machine for every purpose just reflects a real lack of understanding of the challenges of modern warfare, and it doesn't seem as if the current U.S. administration had any appreciation for that before. And frankly, it doesn't seem like they're building an appreciation in the way that I would want to see. Just personally, just personally, as a concerned citizen, you know, you would hope there's lessons learned from this. There don't really seem to be in that way. Yeah, I think so. Like right now, we are the worst at drones that we will ever be again. So we are ramping up slowly on this stuff. We have seen some intelligence come out of the army where they had 400 interceptors of like actual counter drone strikes that were used. But they were only starting to buy significant numbers of these a week after Epic Fury launched, which brings me back to my original point. But so I think it's just moving way too slow. But the whole like Pete Hegsus's whole thing was military readiness, military readiness, all of this stuff, even Donald Trump, peace through strength. OK, I mean, we have been because of the interceptor shortage that we have, as well as like the attack systems, we have been left ruinously unprepared for the next conflict. Because of this just total lack of strategic thinking. And we've already seen we've already had to pull Patriot Interceptors out of South Korea. I mean, we are so much more vulnerable to something elsewhere in the world than we were before. And I do think that the fact that this is all out in the public now, I mean, everybody knows this. And I can assure you that every hostile government to the United States across the world knows that we're low. So, I mean, if there's ever a time to try. something it's now because the u.s is just like fundamentally we have limited numbers of munitions and we've expended so many of them over the last year we burned through 25 of our entire thad interceptor stock during the 12-day war last summer alone and that was before the this epic fury kicked off so i mean it's it's pretty ugly that's right and we see sometimes on our own episodes right we see people down in the comments talking about like you know how can you give all this information away it's weird that warfront's putting all this information away so that you know iran can see all of this data put together i want to be so clear to anybody watching who this might not be clear to everything that we share is publicly sourced publicly available was published by major outlets prior to it being aggregated by us we aggregate data we do not present data that is you know hidden behind classified barriers that was only revealed to us when we were supposed to no none of that the idea that any minimally competent global intelligence agency would not have such a clearer picture of this already than what we've even been able to present because we are reliant on the public domain we are reliant on what's published these people these institutions are not the idea that the u.s could just go in and expend such a high share of its of its interceptor stockpiles of its weapon stockpiles start shifting around equipment start placing procurement orders so on so forth the idea that they could do all of that and global intelligence agencies would not be able to form a very clear picture of what had happened and what the u.s still has is i it just it speaks to again a level of a lack of awareness that is really stunning to me yeah overall i mean so there was a long-standing myth sort of a dispute over the impact of trump on foreign policy so on the one hand people would argue that he was too erratic and that was a huge detriment and on the other hand trump argued that this was an inherent strength because and he did have some things to point to on that in fairness because he would say he would point to for example in turn his first term soleimani okay so he was not pure isolationist by any means he was a he did orchestrate a strike i was in the middle east when that happened by the way that was it was a little nerve-wracking so one of iran's top generals qasim soleimani was taken out in early 2020 and it was a big deal it was a very big deal it was signaling the u.s was not shy about fighting but the concern here being that okay he might be up for very limited short-term strikes but does he have what it takes if push comes to shove to really see it out that's been the concern and i think we this war has really sort of answered that he's very willing to do you short-term things but if push does come to shove i don't know so that's my that's another big concern i have if we cancel this blockade early it's going to be signaling to everybody all you have to do is make this maximally painful for the united states economically speaking and we just fold so that's i mean it's that's another reason i think just maintaining it is just critical not just to our own u.s interest but for global stuff as well because if we do just cancel this and pull out the implications for europe in terms of russia asia as for their threats as well i mean this is going to be something that is transformative in and i do not mean that in a positive way no i completely agree i look at russia looking to potentially push into the baltics push into whether it's it's above the arctic or wherever it is but to test the nato alliance i think of china's ambitions toward taiwan toward the philippines toward other other states in the region it does seem as if there is a window now for as you say about two and a half years for the rest of the world to have a very clear set of operating parameters if they were to engage in aggression against other other nations it's not to say that they have a free pass to it and there will be absolutely no consequences but it is to say that again like you said that the u.s has made it patently obvious that under this administration if you can create and apply economic effort leverage economic pressure you can place american service members at risk that the u.s just does not have the political appetite to engage in any full-scale conflict at all at all because if the u.s is not willing to go to these lengths after an entirely voluntary military operation that trump himself cooked up and decided that he wanted to have done right if he's not willing to go to these lengths for his own pet project what lengths will he be willing to go to when he's drawn into somebody else's war to defend somebody else's soil in a way that he never asked for in a way that his administration never tried to prompt i think about like estonia or latvia you know i know we diverge on this i would be stunned if trump just honored nato's article 5 as written with no attempt to hold back no attempt to send less than was necessary no attempt to try and push off responsibility onto european allies so on so forth i would be stunned if trump were to just follow as written u.s policy on that we diverge sorry well just to say that's true for taiwan that's true for the philippines that's true for many nations around the world i would be very surprised if trump were to react to those situations in a way other than quite frankly trying to wiggle his way out of the u.s's international commitments we diverge less now than we did previously based off of the performance of this war just to play devil's advocate though so like the previous thinking would have been that and i think there could still be some truth to this i'm not like fully fully sold on at least some of it because give it the fact that this was a war of choice almost makes it a different category in that you know we did this foolish thing and now there's two options right we could maintain the status quo blockade and as long as needed even though it's going to be expensive even though this needed not to have happened etc or we could just pull out and cancel the whole thing and try to move on but even if we do that second option which i think would be a terrible message to the international community for all sorts of reasons there still is a categorical difference between that being a war of choice that we just sort of opt out of rather than an act of outright aggression or an even outright invasion by a foreign force that forces us into something where we either blink or shoot back and so i think that i personally like now i'm especially given the lack of munitions that the military is facing i would be severely concerned about our ability to intercept a lot of what russia would be shooting at it or shooting if it was to move on eastern europe but i also have to imagine that you know i mean you that would finish trump in a way that would be very difficult for me to see him going at because he would have much more domestic support as well as much more criticism for not defending these these allies in a way that he really hasn't faced domestically on just criticizing nato if that makes sense it does i worry that partly i worry that public opinion and backlash and all that is not a sufficient deterrent to trump i think if we bring in some domestic politics stuff like you know nobody in the u.s i think at this point really is with trump on the reflecting pool thing for example it's a little petty issue but i think it is emblematic of like these fights that trump picks and then sticks really hard to we can think about the fund for the j6ers that had to be canceled for todd blanche to go through that would have essentially paid out a lot of people who were part of the capital riots back in 2021 i think partially we've seen a willingness for trump to really dig his heels in on roundly unpopular positions when he believes that they serve his own interests and then beyond that i do worry that this administration so many of its decisions whether it's in iran whether it's in other conflict zones around the world whether it is in domestic deal making whether it is in the trump family's use of its political leverage to accumulate quite a bit of wealth everything seems to begin and end itself interest these days I don't know. and for that reason, I really am concerned that if Trump wouldn't do it in a war of choice, he wouldn't do it at all. You know, I hear what you're saying insofar as Trump would take a massive hit by failing to defend, let's say, Estonia. I also worry that he may make the calculus that most of the people who were going to be alienated by that have already been alienated to a degree, and that at this point, what is there to lose, really? Because he's been banging on about the European lack of commitment to security for years and years and years. It's easy enough to say, this should have been Europe's issue all along. They didn't take care of Estonia when they could have. They didn't step up when they could have. Now it's too late. They got themselves into this. I'm not going to come in and save their asses, right? It's when that's such an easy play to make and the only repercussion, really, other than the long-term geostrategic catastrophe that would be, that is not going to be Trump's problem because, again, two and a half years and that he's done. Other than that, I really worry that there's just not enough there to entice him to believe that it's within his own interest to guarantee and honor U.S. security commitments. Yeah. I mean, in terms of wording it, like in terms of honoring security commitments, I do agree with you on that because when these things are raised in that framing, he will always come out and be like, you know, Europe needs to pull it down, blah, blah, blah. But in terms of his own legacy, he cares a lot about that. I mean, he's very, very sensitive to his image in media. He's very willing to lash out over negative coverage, all of these types of things. I have a hard time imagining him if push really comes to shove with Russia expanding beyond Ukraine, just doing nothing. But I am more on your side now than I was a few months ago. I will admit that. Yeah. No, I hope you're right. And it's enough to kind of push him back to some kind of action there. But yeah, it's difficult to keep the faith these days. One other thing I do just want to add is, so one of our very first conversations was about the tolls in Hormuz that I don't think either of us envisioned going on this long. So it's a sort of, it was a sort of similar divergence between us where I was saying the U.S. was going to really stick out the tolls because they would not accept. And we still don't know where that's ultimately going to settle. And it may be 2029 before we finally get a verdict on that. But I think that we're in this interesting situation where we were both right in like the worst possible ways, because you are absolutely right that Iran massively pushed for this and has been able to maintain this leverage over Hormuz in a way that I foolishly thought that the U.S. would have had some form of plan, you know, but I mean, we can, I've already ranted about Hegseth and whatnot enough to... Thank you. the power waging this war would come in with some degree of a plan exactly but overall what i will say is the u.s has not backed out of that yet i mean we're still we're going on six months of this thing specifically because of tolls and hormones so i like it has been a reluctance to escalate beyond what he wanted this war of choice to be but at the same time it's also not something where it's like just complete total concessions even though that mou was like one of the most shocking things in my entire professional career that i have ever seen yeah that document was stunning it was truly stunning something that's important to keep in mind which is like for everything else he does trump does love to delay you know if there is a way to delay and eventuality without necessarily suffering the consequences right up front he will do that and in a way that can be helpful that can be advantageous it also is a way it's something that can be leveraged against the u.s by an adversary who knows how to work with it but it's not always a bad thing like it is it can be good to buy time it does like the more time you buy the longer you have to wait before the negative outcomes hit right and there is something to be set for that there's something to be set for waiting until the situation can change will it change in this case i don't know i would be very surprised if something came along that was big enough at this point to change iran's thinking but who knows you know there's there are worse things to do than divide one's time but yeah i think overall it's it's kind of a discouraging situation if we really look at it closely yeah i do want to push off to a new topic also related to the negotiations and i know you have a lot of thoughts on this but the kind of the nuclear only approach that the u.s has stuck to with iran for decades and decades right now that we're seeing this conflict be decided around the control of the strait of hormuz rather than nuclear weapons right as we've seen iranian leaders kind of come up and say no strait control is more valuable to us in many ways than a nuclear program than a nuclear weapon what do you one what do you make of the legacy of this negotiating approach from the u.s and how that's gotten us to the situation and then how do you see the changes in that in that area playing out yeah i almost have to wonder that it just like how much of this was like cold war hangover thinking because i like for what it's worth i would be severely concerned about iran having a nuclear weapon but at the same time the barrier of entry of using that like the entire world if this actually got used this would be a fundamentally different war in which the islamic republic would not still be standing at the end of it if it was using nuclear weapons it would turn the entire world it would get people who are currently on the sidelines not on the sidelines anymore in a way that would be hard to overstate so it would it from iran's perspective they wanted it as deterrence not as something to actively be going around nuking the middle east so on that front the chance of them actually using it was much lower than the actual methods that they are using so when it comes to their more actively used approaches the first one i'll point to being their proxy forces they are king of proxies throughout the region and successive u.s administrations i'm not going to say have ignored it because obviously they paid attention to hezbollah as well as a few others but they really haven't prioritized it nearly as much as the nuclear file so where whereas you saw with pat and this is totally bipartisan too it was a very nuclear first to the point of being nuclear only and the criticism of the jcpoa was that it was nuclear only but again this is sort of the result of like the cold war thinking where these the nuclear weapons above and beyond all else well okay iran it's sort of up to iran at this point if it wants a nuclear weapon to be honest because of how poorly this war has gone but i ultimately think like they are correct when it comes to hormuz as well as their proxy forces especially in yemen with the babal mendeb being more impactful or perhaps equally impactful i should say in terms of deterrence against future attacks that a nuclear weapon would have served the reason that iran has never been attacked by a major power since at least since in the post-war era has been precisely this they were going to go for hormuz which again is that's why i thought there was going to be some grand strategy here but that aside there that was the go-to leverage that they would be able to pull and it's it certainly had a lot of impact and i think that our lack of focus on those things especially so like their drone program they had been developing this for years and years and really got good at it not just making them but making them while isolated while under sanctions through a lot of domestic production through some chinese help and then was exporting it through the caspian sea up into russia for years they built one of the biggest drone production plants alongside russia in to the north of the caspian there which has been used to attack ukraine ever since and again that just sort of flew under the radar in terms of u.s deterrence policy against iranian threats yeah the iranian military has its many problems i mean you mentioned earlier the lack of a navy the lack of an air force even before this war like iran had no meaningful air power at all very little meaningful naval power that being said iran is a world leader and has been for a long time in adaptive warfare and in highly innovative work writing. This is something that we've seen in Ukraine where we've seen with a lot of countries that are kind of on the butt end of a really difficult geopolitical situation where that, you know, the overwhelming force of the world stacked against them tends to breed new and different sorts of innovation in a way that well-entrenched, very conventional military powers struggle to give up with. So the U.S. in this case, Russia in Ukraine's case, so on. And we're seeing now the long-term repercussions of creating a situation in which this country, you know, couldn't directly challenge any other nation that was some kind of a major power, middle power, whatever it may be, just because of the sanctions, the lack of economic parity, so on and so forth, military parity. But where that country could spend decades working its way through all of the little loopholes in the system to create a new way of warfighting, it shouldn't be lost on anybody. Iran and then Ukraine as well got to modern warfare before nearly anybody else did, including the United States, in terms of the use of long-range drones, in terms of the use of short-range drones. Iran beat the U.S. in that technological race. Iran beat Russia. Iran beat China. Iran beat most countries. Iran arguably is now in at least second place because Ukraine is quite clearly in first. I think you could put Russia ahead of Iran as well. But regardless of that power scaling, Iran was able to anticipate these evolutions in warfare partially because the U.S. was so focused on this narrow negotiating framework, right, where obviously the nuclear issue was first and foremost. And there were a couple of other minor points of discussion, but that was really it. That created this very system that allowed Iran to build its military power and now leverage it. I hope that's not lost on folks listening. I hope it's not lost on a future U.S. administration that, I mean, you can't keep very, very closely to these, you know, tight, self-contained, as-written deals and expect a country like Iran not to play in the loopholes or expect any country not to play with the loopholes. It's just not realistic and it never really has been. The only thing, like, I would then ask, though, is, like, so drones self-explanatory, massive fumble by many countries. The U.S., I will say, not alone there. Israel has also been massively struggling, which, again, I fundamentally just do not understand how these guys, U.S., Israel, and others as well, did not anticipate this. I mean, Israel invaded Lebanon, is currently occupying about a fifth of the South, obviously going to be coming under Hezbollah fire, and is just, like, caught massively flat-footed against drones. They're best friends with Iran. Obviously, they're going to have some Shah heads to be firing at them. I just, I fundamentally do not understand how these guys did not anticipate this. But it seems to have been just this collective... amnesia that everybody was like i'm sure that won't be a problem yeah i would bet every penny that i have that ground commanders knew soldiers knew unit commanders knew the military chain of command knew understood all of this very well for quite a while there is also an economic incentive that kind of comes over the top of everything where you know if you want to retool your military to fight a drone war you now have to tell lockheed martin that they're out of a lot of money and you have to deal with the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of congress people and senators who are really enjoying their lobbying relationship with lockheed martin and you need to get that through the congress you need to get it through the courts because there will be quite a few legal challenges to come down you need to build these procurement pipelines that operate with new companies that the u.s doesn't know how to do business with because the u.s has worked with defense majors you know rtx lockheed northrop grumman general dynamics general atomics a very small subset of companies for quite a few years there is an institutional rigidity there that actively works against the interests of militaries of their troops of the people that they are sworn to protect that is not a i mean obviously at times it can be a very good relationship right lockheed brought the u.s the f-35 thank you lockheed martin right that's a very meaningful defense contribution at the same time the overwhelming pressure of these defense majors has gone a very long way in preventing the u.s from adapting in the way that it should have been doing for a very long time so you know if if that circle doesn't square it's because the military industrial economics of it don't really work out in a way that favors innovation or favors adaptation so much as it favors the consistent rewarding of defense majors who have already gotten very powerful unfortunately and we've already seen this by the way so trump has been floating leasing patriots to be manufactured by ukraine but it's basically stalled at this point which is sort of shocking to me because of how short we are on this we had talked about this briefly last week but it hasn't gone anywhere because the defense contractors are nervous about leasing this out to a foreign country now i said last week that i am very much pro ukraine building these things because we're in just absolute shortage central here but to play devil's advocate at least what the contractors here are saying is look this is very critical stuff to the united states interests and giving it to a foreign power who's currently at or with somebody very hostile to u.s interests risks that is a national security risk essentially do you see that as in as like any sense of legitimate or not really so that's a very good question I will say the latest reports that I've seen, these are citing anonymous sources, so take it for what is worth, but the latest that I'm seeing are more along the lines of that the PAC-3 producers in the U.S. are trying to stonewall that deal because they fear that once Ukraine has access to those designs, Ukraine is going to innovate something better and cheaper, which is something that we've seen before several times over in this war. Right, Ukraine is building, you know, not necessarily technologically better systems, but the cost to effect ratio basically, right, the low price that you have to pay for all the features that you get is so much better in these Ukrainian design centers than the U.S. ones. So take that with a grain of salt, take it for what it's worth, you know, don't treat that as costful. But going to your broader question, is that a legitimate concern? It certainly is, right? You don't want the, like, you don't want a new weapon system to be captured by an adversary. That being said, the U.S. has fought this war in Iran for how long now? I would be shocked if Iran hadn't gotten its hands on a single interceptor. That would be a real surprise to me. Also, quite frankly, it is a risk, but the idea that you would just stop production of these, these interceptors because of that risk kind of goes back to that same idea I mentioned earlier of like, you know, the conflation of the U.S. being a very powerful military versus the U.S. being a military that can solve every problem, right? You can try to minimize and mitigate risks in warfare. You're also engaging in warfare. There is no option that does not include substantial risk. So really it's, the question is, right, does it matter more to you to protect those trade secrets, to protect the interceptors? There's interceptors, by the way, that could not be fired from, say, Russia's or China's systems, that Russia would have to get its hands on a launch vehicle, replicate that in order to launch it, or have to spend years and years in R&D to try and figure out how to launch these things, by which point the U.S. will have innovated past that, right? Is the idea of avoiding that worth more to you than having ballistic missiles drop on U.S. bases in the Middle East or drop on desalination plants or oil refineries or LNG facilities or whatever it is, right? Personally, I think the risk to reward is very heavily skewed to the idea that not only Ukraine, but the Gulf states should be making these. They have the money. They have the spare military industrial capacity. They have, quite frankly, a nearly infinite pool of, of foreign workers to draw upon that they can just pay as needed and slot into their system where they see fit. But I, quite frankly, think they should be expanded across Europe, across the Middle East, across Asia, to the extent that it's possible, not just Ukraine, and not just with interceptors, but with drones, with a whole wide range of things. So, yeah, I mean, you can make your risk assessment and come to the conclusion that it's better to avoid doing that in order to protect, to protect the technical aspects on sovereign defense equipment. And I personally believe that the risk to reward ratio on that has gone way, way past. the threshold where you would need to change your line of thinking yeah in general i am just wildly in favor of getting more of these things being produced so in terms of other countries i certainly welcoming of them to be building them south korea has been making moves on this apparently and i would the fact the fact that like the u.s was like solely responsible or not entirely solely but largely responsible for the production of this interceptor system that defends like so much of the world is just something that i don't think ever really should have happened one country just fundamentally cannot be no country has the resources to be putting out stuff like this even if they are making profit and certainly it was profitable to be manufacturing these and selling these but it just fundamentally does not work i mean what given how important that these interceptor systems are we're in this world now where the expectation of firing missiles big missiles at large population centers is that okay if you shoot 100 maybe two of them get through you know i mean it's not mass devastation in the way that it used to be but that prior world where it is mass devastation comes back real fast the second you run out of interceptors and we're already seeing this in ukraine where the lack of interceptors for conventional missiles has been something that putin is increasingly more than happy to exploit so the lack of stockpile here is i would say like national emergency level or honestly international emergency level i agree it should be treated as such now the unfortunate thing and i hate to bring it back to the industrial side of it is you know we look back at the invasion of ukraine in 2022 as kind of a turning point with the world realized that these post-cold war ideas about like major war just not being really a possibility in the world anymore and that we were all going to be held together by international law and international organizations and this like globally integrated financial system that was going to make it really difficult for countries to be ostracized right we think back in the 2022 invasion as like the moment that all went out the window that's not really true 2022 2023 most of 2024 was still kind of this period where even if it seemed obvious where things were headed a lot of very important people in the defense world and in the in the world of european and indo-pacific governments were all kind of in this same headspace of like can we put this genie back in the bottle at some point at this point it is very obvious that's not what's going to happen the world has changed in a way that is really irrevocable that also is something that started to really become clear in 2024 and 2025 not least because of the actions of donald trump right not so much to you know engage in a full-scale invasion of ukraine attack on another country per se, right? You can talk about Venezuela, you can talk about Iran, so on and so forth, Cuba. But certainly Trump hasn't done anything remotely or something like that. But what Trump did do is essentially dismantle a lot of the international and geopolitical backup systems that world leaders were still, I think, quite frankly, deluding themselves into believing we're still going to matter at some point. And I say all of this to say, right? The realization that we are headed into a new and more conflict-interested world, if you will, is a new realization as of the last couple of years. If that, say two years, that might be an overestimation. And all of these defense decisions don't make any sense if you are preparing for a world in which war is a possibility. But to have the U.S. be the sole producer of so many different kinds of military equipment makes all the sense in the world for U.S. defense majors, if you're going to sell showpiece militaries, showpiece hardware, that the expectation is that they're never going to have to use. And that has been the fundamental assumption of our world for a very long time, in a way that we are only now starting to pay for, and I expect that we will for some time. Yeah, I think overall, this has sort of unmasked a truth that was underlying the world order that many people just sort of assumed was not the case. So when it comes to, like, what I would say is that even just the talk about taking Greenland was massively impactful to this because it really shook Europe as to, you know, even though it didn't happen, and I'm not really necessarily sure how serious of a threat it actually was. But nevertheless, it was, I mean, Europe was, like, staring down the barrel of a potential U.S. invasion again. So, I mean, like, that really is a fundamental game changer. Now, when it comes to the impact of Trump himself, what I would say is he has accelerated it, but it has, it is a result of faulty assumptions that regardless of if it was Trump or not, this whole thing was already sort of in the process of being exposed through, as we could see, 2022 with Ukraine. The fact that they were, that many were able to put that off as not being the deathbed of the international rules-based order, if you will, is only a product of the fact that there was enough rhetorical consensus in certain capitals that it was still a thing. So, I mean, even if you had countries that operated outside of it was this, it's this sort of almost construct, if you will, where people, as long as enough leaders of enough powerful countries opt into it, and this sort of gets into a debate about, like, what is reality? But if enough people convince each other that it is real, then it almost becomes real itself. So for many years, the world was able to proceed along those lines. And so, for example, when you had Iran attacking Kuwaiti ships in the Strait of Hormuz, then the international community said, this can't happen, sailed in, and re-flagged them and escorted them along. But ultimately, as more and more countries were not willing to participate in that, it really just started to fall apart. And so in some other timeline where, I don't know, either Trump was not elected in 2016 or Kamala won in 2024 or something like that, I'm nowhere near convinced that any of this would have inevitably been avoided. I would have seen it just playing out in certainly different ways. Obviously, Kamala would not be invading or threatening to invade Greenland, but I would see it playing out differently. No, I fully agree. I do believe that the world was headed here anyway. I think there's a difference between kind of like blowing over the House of Cards with like a light breeze and taking a flamethrower to it. And I think Trump is kind of now on the flamethrower route. Well, that being said, right, we talk a lot about the wars that happened around the world. We have no way of talking about the wars that didn't happen. We have no way of knowing where the world would have gone, how much better, how much worse it would have been in various ways. I do think that there were a small group of possibilities that it would have been nice to still have where the world could find a way to kind of come around to this new reality without so many disruptive shocks and so much death and so much war. And without setting the conditions for a much longer, years long phase of conflict that we now seem to be headed into. That being said, even though I think we may have sacrificed some of the best case outcomes in that sense, I don't know. Like, obviously, we can't know. Right. But I would suspect that we're not necessarily headed to a worst case scenario here. I think the way that this wake up call came in was not the way that most folks would want it. And that's OK, because we got the wake up call. And what we do with it now, I think the world is starting to react in ways that are certainly more encouraging than they used to be. And we don't know what great catastrophe would have been befallen a world in which most of the world didn't wake up to this until it was much too late. And we don't know what would happen in that world. We know that the world now is waking up to it. And I think there is something to say for that. Yeah, I had a professor in college. This was shortly before the war in Ukraine, who was just enormously convinced that the fall of the liberal international order was essentially exclusively the fault of the election of Trump. And seemed to take this approach where as long. long as you can keep him get him out of office and keep him out of office that we were almost just like magically going to heal this thing and i just have this way i mean my freshman year of college i was i was talking to this guy and i'm like you know i'm obviously being polite because this guy ultimately decides my grades but i'm thinking to myself how does he think this like what in what world does this just like go back to the 1990s you know yeah no trump is you know to the extent that he's a disruptive force and geopolitically speaking you know he is he is yet another symptom of many much larger problems there is a reason that the u.s was so willing and ready to hear this guy not once but twice there is a reason that trump has been able to do all that he has in again in iran and venezuela in the threats over greenland right the idea that trump could come in and do what he has done is not to say that he you know found some way to make the old world disappear he seems to have had a very keen understanding of the old world in a way that a lot of people who were architects of that world really didn't and you know you can say what you want about that but it seems as if we are at least a little bit more honest with each other than we used to be and that's what i value above all else like the clarity on that is so important because a good bad indifferent i mean this stuff is like so important to get right and when it comes to the underlying implications and undermining underlying realities there that is just so important to see clearly absolutely and at this point in the episode unfortunately we are running up against the limitations of our time allotment for the middle east round table which is a little bit more global geostrategic round table this week than it has been in the past but that's all right you know a little bit of a little bit of interesting content on what has been knock on wood a relatively slow kinetic week we'll see how long that holds up so before we finish up today what else around the region are you tracking and what should people listening into this be aware of in the coming week as usual the glacial withdrawal from southern lebanon by israel we will see where that ultimately goes negotiations were basically paused last week the lebanese government government threatened to withdraw they have not fully withdrawn from the negotiation so far which i'm happy to see i do think overall that we do need some form of strategy if this thing is going to work to get out of that but we're going to have to just sort of wait and see because this has been one of the slowest rolling processes that i've seen so far and then of course on the iran front i mean iran is saying that they're not even negotiating with the united states the u.s is saying that they are so not quite sure what to make of that but the negotiations with oman is really what's going to come down to so ultimately we're just going to have to hear back from wilfrid i think the maybe some bad reception over there right now you All right. haven't heard from him yet but perhaps after the episode yeah no i think we'll we'll give him a quick little face time after this see how he's doing say hi to the sultan real quick because i'm sure he'll be in frame but yeah no in the coming week i will be watching the houthi rebels out of yemen as usual they are starting to expand their military action in a way that seems focused on saudi arabia and on the internationally recognized yemeni government that saudi arabia supports but that may expand into some larger collateral consequences across the region in addition i will be watching israel and hamas watching what happens in gaza trying to see whether or not israel really is going to stand in the way of this hamas disarmament that seems to be on the horizon and then what that means politically for netanyahu and his coalition as well so with all of that said just want to say a quick thank you to everybody who has come into enjoy the middle east round table this week enjoys maybe the wrong word you know we're talking about war and death and horrific things but who's come in to perceive and hopefully learn a little something from the round table and from myself and my dear co-host here kyle so thank you again kyle for being here with us if you are listening to this point in the podcast you are almost certainly among our premium subscribers for which we say thank you thank you thank you we could not do this without you we appreciate you very much and really truly you help us preserve our independence you help us continue to do what we do expand our team build new projects including some stuff we're going to launch pretty soon so keep attuned to that you also as of this past week will find the full and complete war fronts and home fronts backlog on fronts.co for praying subscribers so you can find all of our uploads there day by day all in one spot all for your perusal here at fronts.co so thank you again for your support if you have not subscribed yet and you stayed to this point in the podcast then by all means what are you waiting for you know get all those perks get all the premium everything that we got for you with all that said this has been evan maloney for the middle east round table here with kyle moran and we'll see you next week thank you
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