The Times, They Are A-Changin'

Hello and welcome to the Middle East Roundtable here at Fronts.co This is Evan Moloney, head writer for Fronts, WarFronts, HomeFronts, Defensefronts, all things Fronts And I am here with Kyle Moran, staff writer with WarFronts And most recently, HomeFronts, where we have been putting out all sorts of election content Israel, United States, the works Yeah, it

Has been a busy couple of weeks for us here at the front scene.

And busy couple of weeks in the rest of the world as well as we kind of figure out what to do with these American election results and how the entire rest of the world is going to need to kind of cope with this in some way and so on and so forth.

So Kyle, I guess off the top, let's, let's just hear what are your basic US election takeaways and kind of what is our frame looking into the rest of the episode?

What a bloodbath for the GOP. I mean, there's just no other way of putting it. And certainly all sorts of punditry has been talking about that, the intricacies and the rationale behind why so many people voted blue on Wednesday.

But I think we have some unique takes here, especially as it pertains to the Mideast, because this is very much going to define what foreign policy looks like moving ahead.

So the U.S. and israel both had very interesting elections in the last two weeks israel still has not shaken out we'll get back to that in a moment but in terms of the united states election this has been just such a clear rejection of whatever the heck trump was basically pretending would be popular or hoping would be popular and just from all swaths of the

Country so this includes a significant number of people who traditionally vote republican just saying absolutely not so you texas when went blue for both senate and gubernatorial side of things you had Kansas, which hasn't elected a Democrat Senator since 1932 going blue just a clear rejection of a lot of what the administration has been pushing.

I think a lot of it traces to Iran because everything can sort of or most things can come can be seen as being downwind of that.

So certainly the U.S. president ran on keeping the country out of foreign wars, decided to essentially ignore that and then start start another Mideast conflict. And then here we are, everything from inflation to the resulting high interest rates because of said inflation and whatnot is all a direct result of that high energy prices.

I do have to talk about the fact that it's inherently a little awkward that like Democrats are running as the like pro cheap energy party right now I'm not entirely sure how sustainable that is for them no pun intended in terms of sustainability but overall I will we'll have to see how this shakes out but at this point to quote Van Jones on CNN Democrats are

Still hungover from just how much they've been partying the last few days yeah just to give a quick breakdown of the results here for anybody who might not know the full details so presidency obviously was not up for grabs so trump is still in office in the set the democrats have gone from a 47 seat minority to a 54 seat majority so send and pick us for that

Is not enough to overcome the trumping veto also not enough to overcome this whole filibuster, which is kind of this procedural rule where for most items you need 60 votes to pass a law in the Senate.

It is enough, however, to completely stall all Trump's legislation and to kind of be immune to defectors. Two states are outstanding. It's a little less than 74% reporting, narrowly for the Democrat pair, and Mississippi, with 96% reporting.

This race is within 2,000 votes, a little far, nearly a million votes cast. So, also printing Democrats right now, not fair how that's going to go, but Democrats could end up with a 55 or even 56 seat majority, depending on how they swing.

In the faster representatives, Democrats needed only three pickups to take the house, and that picked up from them, with quite a few races so outstanding looks like the ultimate margin of victory might be close to a 50 seat pickup if I need a little more than that which is which would be easily the biggest pickup of the 21st century so far for either party

So really resounding results and to your point how all of this being downstream from the war in Iran, U.S. elections, and especially New Kim elections, are usually two things.

One, they are a referendum on the past term and their time in power. So in the midterms case, it's kind of a chance to vote for or against the sitting president without them being on the ballot. This obviously was a vote strongly against.

But what they also are usually is a reflection of economic concerns. And that certainly seems to be the case here. We've seen a lot of discussion of, of course, oil and energy crisis and kind of the cost being cast down to the consumer.

Estimated now, I've seen anything in the range of like $1,000 to $2,000 paid up per household, essentially, to cope with this change. We've also seen concerns around data centers, AI, so on and so forth.

But all of these concerns are running, as you say, downstream from the Iran war, where even if American voters are ultimately motivated by the price at the pump, the thing that created the price at the pump as it is right now is the scene of the Middle East, which was again, as we've said many, many times on this podcast, a war of choice.

This was an optional affair. This did not need to happen.

There was no imminent threat for Iran There was no threat of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon At any point in the near future Even the claim that Iran Was going to enrich its uranium Up to weapons grade was dubious At that time that they would do it in a immediate fashion and yeah here we are so what are we being set for if i can do math which is not a

Promise i'm a geopolitics guy i'm not a math guy eight nine months out and as a dental truck you should be paying pretty dearly for.

This is, for all intents and purposes, the end of the interest for his educational U.S. prison. Yeah, he's certainly a lame duck and quite a strong lame duck at that, or a weak one, I suppose would be a more accurate way of phrasing it. I think moving ahead, he's going to be just so up against the wall in terms of getting anything done.

My concern here being that because there is no way to get legislation through, and even if they get rid of the filibuster, then they cannot override Trump's veto without significant Republicans. Basically, the next two years, we're going to have this like hung Congress situation where you just don't get anything done.

And I think that's going to be particularly unfortunate because a lot of people were for some change, whether that be on health care, whether that be on.

But the biggest thing to me, where this goes with Iran moving forward. So we had talked a great deal in the lead up to the U.S. midterm election about where everything goes after this. And it did look like for quite some time that basically Israel and the U.S. were basically just waiting to get through their respective elections.

And afterwards, they were both going to team back up and start bombing away again. This may still happen, but it might not. Evan, what have you been seeing on this front?

Yeah, my best get us at this point is that if we don't see action this week, we might not see it for a little while. A few things are happening at once right now that would kind of put a lot of pressure on the U.S. to have something happen in Iran either today or over this weekend.

Number one, as we're going to talk about at greater length, Israel's election process may be drawn to a close.

It's looking like Gadi Eizenhot, the main opposition figure, is looking at a critical window to form a coalition. That means that Benjamin Netanyahu, current prime minister, whose time in the caretaker role is going to be drawn short per se.

For Trump, getting Netanyahu's turnout extended or potentially flipping the situation in Israel in some ways so that relationship can continue has been very important.

If Trump would like to help to create some kind of geopolitical turmoil to extend Netanyahu's mandate this is the way to do it so that's number one number two so there are two carriers and on this right now US carries records there is one just right now there is a short window of time based on the time left in the deployment of the two that have been there

For a while, where you can keep three carriers in the region before having to send one back to the U.S. and then the second one pretty soon after that.

Carriers are not the only enabling factor that would really allow for large gun strikes but each of them do carry you know 80 to 90 combat jets and each one of them you know you can position them wherever you need to kind of help out logistics refueling make it easier to attack from unexpected vectors so on so there are a lot of tactical advantages come with

That especially when you weigh in the devastation to a lot of US bases earlier this year that were on Middle Eastern soil.

So in ordinary times, you could use those bases as kind of a jumping off point where you wouldn't really need carriers.

Right now, carriers are a good redundancy if you're accepting large scale Iranian retribution. So that's factor number two. And then factor number three either your election side is much more kind of like politically demonstrative for Trump.

I mean, I don't think at this point in the 2020s, it's going to shock anybody for me to say, you know, Trump is very much a guy who is driven by matters of ego and pride and a willingness to, or kind of an urge to demonstrate his power, right?

And foreign policy and specifically the ability to order the start of military operations abroad are well within his purview still. We're going to talk pretty soon about how, and in the longer term, Democrats can push back on that.

But in the short term, if Trump gives a go order, that's the order. There is no real way for Democrats to get in the way, especially during this Landau session where this new Congress has not yet been seated.

So all of the decisions that Trump makes do need to still filter through the outgoing Landau Congress, which does not seem as if it's going to really be going out of its way to a strong strong on basically anything we'll talk a little bit later about why they might not even really meet and get very much done at all but that's that's a separate conversation

All of that is to say there are a number of different factors that would suggest that you do this weekend two other factors to name first off, as we've seen, Trump loves a strike heading into the weekend where you can have a big weekend of really intense activity and then kind of calm it down by Monday.

Really, for stock market purposes, that is especially important right now. We just saw a massive loss yesterday I saw, Arpit, due to fears on the AI industry that new regulation, new scrutiny from a Democratic Congress is going to create some issues. I believe it was like a $2.5 trillion loss yesterday for the AI companies.

So adding more of a market shock on monday is something trump will probably try to avoid last point a really minor one but kind of technically tactically relevant it is a new moon in iran this weekend u.s military really likes to go in for its biggest strikes when it is as dark as it can possibly get.

And this weekend it will be, I believe it's going to be some tough weather in Iran as well, which will make air defense harder. And then it will be a moonless night, I believe Sunday into Monday and very, very dim in the nights leading up to and coming away from that.

So all of those factors together would suggest that if Trump does want to launch a strike now, probably this coming weekend is the window for him to do that. And if we get through this weekend, we're not home free necessarily, but I think we can expect the likelihood will be lower that there will be another follow-on strike.

My biggest question here is, I mean, we hear, especially from the almost certainly soon to be impeached Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, that if we just go at this again, we go at this harder, we go at this bigger, we're going to, the Islamic Republic is teetering on the edge of collapse.

Back in January, back in February, you know, there was, I was more susceptible to the idea that the regime was actually quite weak because we had seen some of the biggest protests in, since the Islamic Republic's founding in 79, as well as most, almost certainly the biggest crackdown since then as well but at this point i mean what are these guys thinking i

Just i don't even it's not even that i don't agree with them i don't see how they could possibly think but they do and they're the ones who have significant sway over this not evan or i so my starting question before i go any further evan what is going on here what do we see in terms of where this is going and the logic or lack thereof behind it yeah if i

Had to guess this comes down to a level of magical thinking quite honestly there is not a there is not really a tactical rationale as far as I can see that getting around again is going to really galvanize some kind of changing government now going back to what you said before around like February and January where the US kind of had a window to get this

Done I mean I've said this a few times on the podcast I'll say it again.

The US did have a window to get this done. They then completely botched it within the first couple of days.

I mean, you had MS support for outside help for a regime change action in Iran. You had, of course, this first day of crippling strikes where command and control on the Iranian side was really just basically light hell. And then within 48 hours, the U.S. has bombed a girls' school, killed well over 100 children.

It has rained fire into the streets of Tehran and other major cities where if you were waiting on civilians to come into the streets the streets are getting bombed you can't have that I mean you saw no effort to you know one of the things I often throw out in these conversations you saw no effort to provide or airdrop weapons to just Iranian civilians or

Otherwise armed, you saw very little willingness from the US and this was obvious within like the first couple of days, the US seemed to believe that it could achieve capitulation with a few rounds of strikes and it had no plan for a world in which that doesn't happen other than to double down on airstrikes.

I mean, we talked before about the incredible lack of risk tolerance and pain tolerance the U.S. has exhibited, which is more than fair if you were a country trying not to get your citizens killed in overseas wars, but then don't start overseas wars. Here's really what it comes down to.

If you are not willing to, you know, if you were looking at this war in Iran, you say you want to achieve some sort of regime change which the administration has changed its priorities, changed its objectives many, many times.

I think one of the things we can say fairly conclusively at this point, just based on the available evidence, is that regime change was a priority, at least for a while. If you want to do that and you were willing to order kinetic action, I mean, my thinking is, and I'm sure this is nothing we're able to hear for obvious reasons.

I, as an American, also don't. But if you're a military decision maker, do you order this, all of this without the willingness to accept a thousand casualties later in set to take down one of the world's slate, easily one of the world's top 50 economies, right.

To go in and, you know, try and affect regime change on a really well-established will and transportation defended by hundreds of thousands of people?

Just in uniform? Not even to mention their paramilitaries and everybody else? I mean, do you go in with the risk tolerance that you were unwilling to accept 100 candidates?

Which, to my knowledge, it doesn't seem like we've gotten to yet. I know there are some antagonists that have not been reported by the U.S. Pentagon, which is a whole other conversation in itself, but it doesn't seem like we're at a hundred. All of this.

And we, you know, if you're going to attempt something this day and you can't justify a hundred cash, please draw people. Maybe don't do the operation is what it comes down to. None of that half the list has changed.

None of that risk aversion has gone away. It's just that we're now in a politically disadvantageous position where we need some kind of hope. If you're a Pentagon planner, if you're Pete Hanks, you need some kind of hope that you can turn this back to your advantage.

Now, is that going to happen? Probably not. But I think right now he is in a situation, and his allies at Aragon are in a situation where they are weighing between an option in which there is, quite frankly, almost no chance of success and an alternative, which is to accept that there simply won't be a success.

So it's to you taking 97% chance of failure by engaging in this or a 100% chance of failure by not engaging and when you've opted for that 97% this is you know not even a military thing that's just a human psychology thing That justification machine starts to kick into gear and you start looking for places to be optimistic.

You start looking for ways to offer to your advantage and then it's very easy to sell yourself on an idea that you are committed to even if you know kind of deep down that your chances of success were not high. So I think that's, you know, obviously a lot of psychology for, you know, Pete Hengsteth, but as far as latency, that seems to do with losing this.

Yeah. I mean, I have almost nothing to disagree with there. So overall that very well said, I think the biggest problem going into this was botching it from the outset with specifically no backup plan.

So they, and this was something that I was floored by. I had the biggest moment of horror when I found out, when I was starting to realize that, oh my goodness, these guys truly don't have a plan B when it comes to core moves.

Because if you attack a wrong the number one thing they're going to do is go for Hormuz this was so baked into the cake it's impossible to overstate my thinking was when they did this was oh sure okay I mean, obviously, naturally, they go for her moves.

So what is the administration's next play? And I just continued to think very naively, I may add, that there was something else up their sleeve. That something else just never came because there was no grand strategy here.

Now, we have seen shuttle runs. We have seen oil getting through Hormuz at a pre-war level. But it's been after months of such a trough as well as other downwind results of this, including off the coast of Yemen.

Houthi Evin can perhaps fill us in on that in a moment. But the biggest, the price of oil has not even come close to rebounding and that's been very detrimental to the economy, very detrimental in terms of inflation.

And like I said earlier, it has led to the rather unusual position where Democrats are running against a Republican administration on the platform of lower gas prices, which is certainly a far cry from where some of the party was even just a few years ago.

So moving forward, though, I have to think that this midterm election is such a blow, such a blow to the administration that if they were to keep up with this idea that, okay, maybe if we, even through the most wishful thinking, even through the most fanciful thinking, even if they want to think, okay, Iran could fall if we just go at it a little bit harder,

Then, or at least they may capitulate for moves or things that's a bit more realistic the midterm results were just simply so bad for the GOP I just cannot see how Trump would face anything other than serious pushback even in his own party if he was to ramp things up and this is really unprecedented territory for us because Donald Trump has been at the head

Of the GOP to various extents for the last 10 years at this point, if we're being honest.

Throughout all of it, he has been able to exercise enormous control over the party in no small part through the primary threat. He was able to say, look, if you don't go with me, I'm going to back your primary opponent and my supporters are going to hate you, and it's not going to go well for you.

And to some extent, that played out quite well. So there were a few notable outliers, namely Mitt Romney was able to hang on in Utah, and then retired, but was able to hang on despite all the constant berating from the president. But if you look at all the other establishment guys, Jeff Flake, I remember, and as well as many others, they all lost.

Almost all of them lost.

So this is unprecedented territory, though, because for the first time now, tying yourself to Trump is not the be-all, end-all of winning over voters, and we really haven't seen that in basically a decade on the Republican side, and I think that escalating things with Iran again is only going to exacerbate that and really opens up the window for somebody or

For politicians in the GOP to actually start growing some vertebrae again.

Kyle, when I was a kid, I first started following politics in the 2020, excuse me, wow, I can't say 2012 today, 2012 elections, this is when I started really tuning in as, at that point, a ninth grader, I believe, tuning in and really following along.

And ever since then, I have had a real love of Republican primary debates are just the fattest thing to me because I really, truly, I have never seen a group of people more willing to just throw each other directly under the bus, back the bus over each other, run each other over again, and do it all again. It's really just, it's a ton of fun.

All of that to say, compared to that, what we are about to see is going to be the mega civil wars for a while.

In that there is a lot of risk in different directions. And I think now we're starting to see, including with JD Vance, who kind of put out a thing blaming the election defeat on Iran and other issues. We're going to see people start to break with Trump in ways that may or may not succeed.

At the same time, there are limits and kind of penalties that come with being the first person to the right position, if that makes sense.

Breaking with the Donald Trump is going to be politically advantageous for a lot of these people trying to figure out what comes after him in a party where he is certainly going to be one of the loudest voices as a current and then for a resident but where he is not going to really have any kind of political future of his own, it is, of course, politically

Advantageous to break with him and figure out how to do that in a sustainable way.

That being said, the first few people to try that are going to get the shit kicked out of them.

It's going to be a really, really hard time for the first few and with that i think we're gonna see the next cycle of special elections because there are always a few we're gonna see the power tested of trump's endorsement we're gonna see whether he can throw his support behind a you know a republican special primary and get his preferred candidates through

The issue here is my day is so still treachery right now but Trump is absolutely still the default voice for most people listen to him and what that means is he has enough to his a support to kind of – he has enough political gravity left to anchor enough of the party around his choices and his decisions that it's going to be really hard to break any of the

Way to create majority consensus for something else.

Then again, what he seems to have right now is a plurality of support from Republicans, not an outright majority. If you were to think about it again in primary election terms, this is kind of how Trump got to the nomination in 2016, where he was polling 15, 20% for the first few primaries, but in a very crowded primary.

Where if you have 15, 20%, there's 15, 20 people running, then you with one fifth of the overall vote share are doing fantastic, you're on top of the polls, because everybody else is dividing that remaining vote share so many ways.

I suspect that for a little while, we're going to see a similar dynamic like out where, even though Trump doesn't have kind of the mandate that he used to have, he does have enough of a plurality of support to prevent other ideas from really taking over.

The issue on our botnet is that whatever the Trumpian center is probably is still going to drive action for the nest a little while and So far what we've seen this forwardly is that includes doubling down Includes maximal strikes that includes maximal rhetoric It includes, you know going after as many high-ranking decision-makers as possible for as long as

Possible.

Really kind of this maximalist hardline default for the Republicans I think is going to hold at least for the next little while until something can replace it. And something will. But together I think you have to kind of go through a bloodbath that the Republicans have not really begun yet.

I think we're going to see that in the next few weeks.

But as far as the immediate term i think that kind of like trumpian knee-jerk let's just bomb everything see what happens is probably going to be the prevalent project for a little while that is concerning and not what i wanted to hear to be honest but i can't necessarily say i apologize with all of it but i similarly got my start following politics with

2012 i think it was a year younger i think it was in eighth grade when that was rolling around and when you look back on politics back then all i can say is we were so like the country was in such a better place like it was things are just so much more they were less insane.

But yeah, overall, the thing with the like, keep doubling down thing.

Now, this is at the core of Trump strategy. This is at the core of who he wants to be. But the thing is, Republicans tried that in this year's midterms, and they it was awful.

It didn't go well at all. So they in particular, because the I've said on this podcast previously, and I'll say so again, nobody was able to tell me a single reason to vote Republican in federal races, that is the cycle. There was not a single, there was no single reason.

Well, the ballroom, Kyle, obviously. Yes, indeed. How could I forget?

But they did run on just like the most culture war slop nonsense you can imagine. So I mean, some of the stuff that I saw coming out of some of these candidates was like, unprecedentedly ridiculous. So Ken Paxton in Texas, ran an AI generated ad, I believe it was showing James Tallarico rewriting the Bible to include six different genders.

Anti-Tallarico ad. I love that. That's special.

Wow. Yeah, no, you have no idea. I mean, God bless Texas, but I mean, it's really something.

Some Texan reporters were saying that they were receiving anti-Tallarico texts saying things like, "Sign the release form so your son can attend tomorrow's drag show.

And Trump, for his part, called South Carolina Senate candidate, who is not even transgender, by the way, Annie Andrews, all sorts of ridiculous names but it was it was not a issue they backed down from it's just that it was seen as completely irrelevant to the concerns of most voters i think only 10 percent of voters put trans issues on the in the top three

Or four things facing the country this cycle.

To quote the incoming Texas governor, "You can shove it with your culture wars." This was a really good line by Gina Hinojosa.

She said, "My pronouns are mom, Texan, and governor elect of Texas. So that was really something special, but I'm getting sidetracked here on Texan politics. But the big focus here for me is that we've seen them try this and it just didn't work.

They tried like the most extreme double down, double down, double down from what they did in 2024 to success then, but it just completely was, it was seen as fighting an enemy that doesn't exist. Nobody's talking about this. Why are people talking about your son being taken to a drag show?

It's not, this is not relevant to the concerns of voters. And I similarly think that if we start seeing double down, double down, double down with Iran, it's going to go exactly the same way.

Because a lot of the anti-GOP sentiment in this midterm was anti-iran war including with republicans you have the unprecedented situation where peggy noonan who is a wall street journal writer a correspondent or op-ed writer and nick fuentes and who the two of them do not agree on anything ever i obviously they were both in lockstep that the gop has to be

Burned down and built back up peggy noon wrote an article titled the case for historic wave excellent read recommend it in which he was basically saying look they're doubling down on all of this stuff and it's just not it's not worth it.

This is not what the party needs to be. And the only way to really send a message that things have to change is to burn it down and start again. And for very different reasons, Nick Fuentes and the Gripers were basically saying the same thing.

So while I cannot disagree with you that Trump is certainly inclined to double down. I don't see this working at all. I see that as making things significantly worse.

And given that 2028 is only two years away and we're already seeing some talk about who's going to run, then this is really going to be sort of a taking a bazooka to your, and shooting at your own feet type of situations. Yeah, no, I totally agree. This is not this is not a politically savvy strategy.

This is not politically soundstretching at the same time you know you just lay out the incredible focus on anything but electorally salient issues this cycle frankly I just I would not stack political decision makers who had been so happy to have went off that course to quickly turn on a dime and be able to apply a completely contravening political logic to

Now manage this loan.

What I mean by that is these folks have doubled down on the issue of choice, will get me to the result that I want, that's been their thing for 10 years, Certainly, there is a very clear lesson to be learned on their side from this election result. That being said, I would not expect that they can change very quickly.

And I would expect Harvard to change only when new voices and new figures start to claim power and kind of try to make an alternative case for how the party should be run in the short term, especially during this lame-done period before the new Congress is seen. I don't expect to see any political change in that way.

I do think that if there is an argument for strikes not to happen this weekend or not to happen in the near future, it may be more of a boredom based argument from draw.

I mean, we saw the day actually lesson he, you know, call this great big speech and it was supposed to be this after the midterms some kind of take away and it just ended up being a tour of ballroom construction really truly that's not an exaggeration I can't seem to know what happened in that almost in the talk of the midterms at all just ballroom stuff

Just hanging different steel beams and window framing and all that in that sense I think you could make the argument for a very checked out Trump.

I don't know that you could make that argument while you have A, Benjamin Netanyahu about to lose his premiership, and B, Pete Hexup on the brink of potential impeachment. And maybe we should talk about that Hegseth issue as well, because just to give a bit of background, Hegseth obviously has been one of the driving forces behind this war.

He, so an outgoing congressperson, Thomas Nassie, introduced articles of impeach, or didn't introduce, he drafted articles of impeachment prior to the end of the last congressional session.

Those were about to be introduced, and then Congress broke and all the hell went to their home districts to campaign basically in order to not vote to impeach Hexeth, or not to.

That was a decision made by the Republican speaker and his allies to basically send that was all those articles are now massive saying they are going to be introduced they are privileged which means they come before all other legislative business so in ordinary years the Congress would come back together for one last session in during the lame duck period

For Trump watches Congress shift over to the super folks for his left.

And usually what happens during that session is, you know, you get through any federal judges that you can with the majority that you have you, if there's any cabinet officials you want to replace, you try to get rid of them and usher in somebody new who a friendly congress will approve and so on and so forth that doesn't seem all that likely to happen

Because now when these people come back together that heads of impeachment is going to be top line ahead of everything and it doesn't seem like the current republican congressional leadership is willing to let that happen on their watch now the most they can do at this point is to kick the can down the road but it does seem like they may choose to do that

And if so, a couple of things happen.

One, Hegseth has now granted a window to try and make his case, which we've seen, you know, all of his political decision-making is just doubling down, doubling down, doubling down. There is some talk about getting him to transition into a Senate seat.

Senator Marshall Blackburn may or may not retire if there is space for him. That doesn't seem to be all that late period down, but it's on the horizon as something that may happen. If it doesn't, Grant, again, that gives HF a window of opportunity to do what he thinks that he does best.

You know we can talk all day about whether or not it's actually a valuable or helpful thing i would argue it's very much not but you know he seems to believe his he is at his best when he's doubling down on waging war and he'll have a window of time to do that so i am curious how you think the impeachment at HSF will or will not impact the Iran rule within a

Few weeks.

And then also what that kind of specter looming over the lane dot Congress means for their basically what was supposed to be Trump's last relatively friendly legislative period. Yeah.

I mean, it's not gonna be anything other than a shit show. This is the long and the short of that one. I do think it's kind of funny that this is sort of Massey's last hurrah and it probably is going to pass.

Multiple House Republicans have mentioned that they think it's going to pass, which means it's not just gonna be Massey voting for it, along with Democrats, others will join. And you have seen extraordinary criticism, extraordinary, from Tom Tillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina.

So to your point on doubling down, Pete Hegseth certainly was trying to do this.

So just yesterday, he posted a video standing in front of the renamed Department of War, saying, at the War Department we stand, we fight, we defend the Republic doing Hegsessian things.

And Tom Tillis quoted this, and amongst other things, said this is about you, the incompetence you've displayed, the bad advice you've given to the President, and your shameful and embarrassing episodes from firing our top generals to texting war plans to reporters so i think it's i think it's safe to say there's going to be some republicans votes to get rid

Of this guy and to their credit i mean the way he has carried out many of his decisions while at the top of the department there have been so astonishing to me.

I think Trump, so Trump has addressed this.

He has been talking about, you know, if we do need a new secretary of defense, it would be easier to get one through in the lame duck before democrats take over because they will have the senate and whatnot but the sort of go around here is you can have an acting secretary of defense for indefinite periods of time and during the first his first

Administration he did this with many cabinet positions there was all sorts of positions that just stayed unfilled formally because he didn't want to have confirmation hearings so I don't think this necessarily would be quite the slam-dunk that some Democrats might think it is but you'd at least be rid of Hegsath which is an accomplishment in and of itself

Moving forward though i'm not i'm just not so sure that whoever replaces him would necessarily be all that different and in particular i did see the report that he may become senator briefly that would be quite a way to lose Tennessee in 2028.

Yes, it would be. Bloom-Tennessee, I think, is still not in many people's fago cards.

I guess all the lecture, Blue-Iowa, Blue-Kansas, Blue-Texas, it maybe should be possibly Blue-City. I do want to also ask, so technically speaking, the U.S. provinces have the ability to constrain Trump for a while through something known as the War Powers Act.

Basically, how that works is, you know, because of the nature of global affairs and the rapid evolution of all sorts of situations and crises and whatever, you really never know what's going to happen until it happens so long.

There is obviously broad language with the Office of the Presidency to be able to send troops abroad, to be able to embark on foreign deployments, all that. The way the U.S. gets around that is through an act that basically says within 60 days you have to either bring all the troops all or ask for approval for whatever you're doing.

That was something that the Congress could have easily taken up within the last round.

It was introduced a couple times. I believe it never really got anywhere because there wasn't really the political will to support it.

Calvin Hexstaff kind of made the argument at the time of like oh well operation epic fury was the first 60 days when we ended that now it's operation this that whatever you know kind of like changing the name of the thing that they're doing to try and argue that it's a different thing that of course is very legally fragile that would not i think stand up to

Any legal test although in this Supreme Court you never know that being said that is now on the table for house and senate Democrats to take up so do you think we're going to see a much more aggressive pursuit of the powers vested in the world powers act or do you think that's going to remain kind of that letter for now we could but the problem there are

Many problems with the war wars power war powers act first and foremost being that every president of each of both parties since it was passed, has contested its constitutionality.

It was vetoed by Nixon, or I think it was Nixon who vetoed it. Congress overrode him. But ever since, every single president has contested that this is flagrantly unconstitutional.

And I think that there is a solid case to be made that it is sort of just pie in the sky stuff because it tries to settle a very black and white issue with a sort of both black and white response.

So the, to the question of does, who declares war, who that being Congress, of course, but who has the ability to actually carry out operations the president vested in his article two powers, the, their response to squaring this circle has been through the war powers act, the 60 day thing with a possible 30 day extension.

This legal, legally speaking makes almost no sense the president either does or does not have the constitutional authority through article 2 to do this to do something like this the constitution says nothing on 30 days or 60 days, or 90 days.

There is, you don't, you don't sort of have Article Two for 60 days and then lose it, just because Congress in the 1970s said that you do. So when it comes to this, I don't see how that can, they can possibly hold up in any Supreme Court, but that may be a question that will come to be settled later on.

It was passed because it was popular because the Vietnam situation was so unpopular and being able to reign in the president, you know, sounded good.

Credit where credit's due. Okay, it sounds good. But I mean, it just, it doesn't legally make sense, in my opinion.

But we'll leave that to the legal scholars to hash that one out.

Notwithstanding, as to if they should do War Powers Act, I have long been sort of a critic of using it partially because it is inherently very limiting in terms of being able to defend if iran so if iran escalates in response to that which they could i mean we have seen the irgc essentially take every opportunity the administration gave it to including just

Massive sums of cash sanctions relief all this stuff and just say no thanks you know they want to do their own thing and they will pursue that pretty resolutely if Congress passes the War Powers Act and Iran then responds by some God only knows what so potential ground operation or increased strikes at the region under the War Powers Act itself, the

President would be limited from being able to respond to that without further authorization from Congress.

That would mean defense of allies in the region would be limited.

That would mean that being able to intercept and shoot down incoming projectiles would also potentially be limited, depending on how extensive the act that gets passed would be. To me, this is a massive red flag that would signal a lot of potential issues coming down the pike to come.

But on the other side of things, I also don't really know what other option Congress has because Trump has been very clear.

He does not care what Congress thinks on the Iran war. He's going, he was going to do this regardless. And there was not a thing Congress could say to stop him.

And unfortunately that's led us to this situation where it's like, okay, you have only bad options do you go for a bad option they very well might i don't know we shall see but what say you yeah i think there are kind of two separate questions here one of the kind of the war powers act legitimacy in a broader sense and whether or not it's a good idea in the

First place whether or not it needs to be relitigated or tried and ordered or you know thrown out in a place with something new versus the conversation about like, okay, well, this is an instrument right now that the Democrats can leverage and can they attempt to leverage it for what it's worth?

Certainly in this environment where we've seen, you know, not necessarily a Vietnam like environment in terms of the conditions on the ground in Iran, but certainly Vietnam like popular sentiment of just overwhelms or for an anti foreign regime change anti-foreign policy in the united states where all that is to say there's there's sufficient political will

Right now to make this a moment where that question is asked more seriously right how do you go about regulating the powers of the president to declare war in a way that makes sense in a way that you know deals with geopolitical realities in the ground is that even plausible can you even do it and if not should we just give up this history right certainly

That's a conversation that can be had now and can be pushed kind of into more of the popular discourse Discourse is going to resonate with voters, so on.

So in that sense, it may be politically advantageous while the Democrats also have legislative power and have the power to put forward their preferred version of something if they have an alternative.

This may be the time to have that conversation. On the other hand, I think there is also the very real argument of like, out of all of the tools right now at Democrats' disposal, if this one works, it is among the clearer options that they have.

As for the concerns that you raised, especially about the U.S.'s ability to defend allies and so on, I think that's partially, at least in theory, why you have so many foreign bases around, right?

So that an established U.S. presence can say, you know, I'm defending myself, I'm defending the government with which I have, you know, signed all sorts of agreements and whatever that grants me the right to be here, the right to defend myself and damn it.

And so I think there is an argument to say, you know, you can invoke the War Powers Act, you can constrain the president's ability to launch offensive wars without necessarily too far curtailing the ability to defend allied nations. So in this case in the Persian Gulf, but anywhere.

But then again, that is also an issue that would need to be litigated up in some way so big question whether the political will exist to do any of that and I think something else that's going to sort of be a particularly relevant factor for where all this goes from here is the Israeli elections, which we do have some news out of Israel on.

So last week when we checked in, I believe it was last Thursday, so I remember I made the point that nobody really has a clear path, but of the two gentlemen leading the race, Gadi Eisenkot has a better path, whereas Netanyahu, it was very difficult to see any path to get a majority from him the only path he really had was getting eisenkotia shah party to

Join him in a unity government and as i made the point previously benny gantz tried that with his blue and white party and it imploded he wasn't even a factor in this year's election.

He dropped out.

His party dropped out, which is pretty stunning because there are 37 other parties. And the fact that there wasn't even room for a 38th for somebody who served as in a unity government is pretty striking to me.

But that notwithstanding, the first thing that the Israeli incoming Knesset does is each party will go to the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, and formally recommend who they wish to be the next PM.

So, of course, this was going to come down to one of the two leading candidates. And as of right now, Guy Eisenkant has 67 recommendations. So that's party leaders representing their parties, saying that them plus their MKs, incoming MKs, wanted to support or wanted eisenkot.

This is to Netanyahu's 46 MKs, which includes obviously Likud. You have religious Zionists, Otzma Yehuda, which is Jewish power, and Shas. And then you have UTJ, United Toward Judaism, abstained.

They said, "We have no preference. We'll come what may." So this is a striking development because it tells me that Eisenkant has spent the last week really working to build up a coalition that can get to a 61-seat majority. Now keep in mind that those recommendations is not indicative that he already has it.

It's merely a beauty contest of who they'd rather. These parties from Eisencott being Yashar Beahad, the Democrats, Israel, Britannia, and Ram, all voting or all casting their support for him.

That doesn't mean they're all going to serve together in government, they would have to figure out all sorts of stuff that's going to get quite complicated and could take significant time.

But it does mean that he has a path. And I, at this point, simply do not see Netanyahu could get to 61 unless Eisenkot decides, you know what, I'm just going to throw in a towel and go down the Gantz route. But again, at this point, I don't really see that happening.

So I think the chance of Netanyahu being PM at this point is low. I think the chance of a new Israeli election, in the case no government conform is low to moderate. And I think the best case scenario, like most likely scenario would be Eisencott takes over.

As that pertains to the Iran war, Eisencott certainly no Iran dove. He was the man who ran the IDF for years. But he's also no BB.

So he has been pretty indicative that he would only take military action against iran if he thinks they could actually topple the government if he believes they are actively moving towards a nuclear weapon though those two things are pretty big differentiators between himself and Netanyahu.

Netanyahu may talk a big game about wanting regime change, but he wasn't particularly successful in orchestrating it. As we can see, 90 plus percent of Israelis believe that Iran won the last round of war in Israel.

This was Operation Roaring Lion. And it was, like I said, just not particularly successful for the same reasons. Stateside, nothing particularly helpful for anyone came of that.

Eisenkant, you know, I don't want to rule anything out because he will have to be in coalition with people. In particular, Yisrael Betanyu under Avigdor Lieberman would be some of the most hawkish in his coalition.

But it's still, I would, I would still say that it's more likely that we see strikes kicked off or be extremely limited under an Eisenhower premiership than a BB premium premiership.

Trump and Eisencott barely know each other unlike Bibi with him who go back years. So it's going to be a whole different dynamic, especially with such a huge congressional majority stateside for the Democrats again as we've largely because of a rejection of their own war.

So let me ask you this then, as of the rates of the worst visit rates thinking about netanyahu's routes to preserve any power at this point as he seems continually inclined to do with a potential resumption of lots of ways this weekend one is there a way for him to parlay that potentially into a stronger push for a unity government under these circumstances

To an extension of his caretaker role really anything else like is there a way for him to leverage a return to conflict to prolong his time in office.

That's the concern amongst some in the Israeli opposition, specifically the Zionist opposition.

And for what it's worth, former prime minister, who is a very long time Netanyahu critic, Ehud Barak, posted on X the other day netanyahu may drag us into a war that will only strengthen the iranians just to cling to a seat there is no shred of information that requires immediate action against iran that cannot be taken if it becomes necessary in another six

Weeks and not in another three days he posted that on november 1st so basically and this was a very long thread he posted but making the general point that a lot of this seems to be suspiciously about the election, about a new government forming and ostensibly looking to preserve Bibi's time as top dog.

Yair Lapid has also said quite a bit about this.

He came out saying that Bibi's gone off the rails and somebody's got to get rid of him, basically. And that's what the opposition is trying to do. We'll see how successful they are, how not successful they are.

But as to the Iran war question, I mean, that was a concern of mine.

Before the Israeli elections, there was a serious chance, and this got Bibi accused of treason in the country by Lieberman, actually, of the Israel-Britannia party, that he was going to use the IDF to start another conflict with Iran, just to either cancel the elections, kick them down the road. Now, this would still require Knesset approval, by the way.

So it's not like we can just say, JK, we're not these election. You know, we're not doing that this year. Come back in another four.

But it would provide cover fire for the current coalition. But the new Knesset is set to be sworn in next week, I believe, late next week. And he will not have a majority for that.

And already he doesn't have a majority to do much of anything.

So where things go from here I mean it's it's hard to say exactly I at this point though I don't really see Iran coming back to save his career though and then so another question on the Israeli military we've heard concerns for a while now about how badly overstretched Israel is and you look at the number of things they have going on right Gaza is still

Kind of in the same state that it has been for a long time the West Bank they just did this big operation there's concerns about potential isolation future much of southern Lebanon remains under Israeli control there's still this buffer zone in Israel, I'm sorry, in Syria, that Israel is occupying.

There's concerns over this growing kind of conflict and tension with Turkey.

There's the existential threat of the Holocaust in Yemen, and then there's Iran.

So of all of those, for this really overstretched IDF that is also now having to, if we're to believe the promises that Trump made on election day, win the lottery, receiving $4 billion in aid each year from the united states out of all of those ongoing military engagements and deployments and buffers and whatever what do you anticipate being prioritized

Versus what will be deprioritized or wound down if eisenstein is able to take over so to be honest, not a lot being wound down.

So there may be some talk where people would like a more restrained Israeli foreign policy.

I think there's going to be less, like had Eisencott been premier for the last four years or so, I think some things would have been going on quite differently. So there would have been far less settler terrorism in the West Bank, that being Jewish settler terrorism, not Palestinian.

And there would have been a far less expansive campaign in my opinion into Lebanon but now that Israel is already there you know I mean perhaps we will start seeing that this deal is actually implemented to date that this was agreed back during late summer the IDF has pulled out of one count them one Lebanese town Zatar al-Gharbia which is the literally the

Only place so far we may start seeing under Eisencutt more progress being made there so the deal with Beirut was that IDF withdraws LAF goes in to displace them, and people are able to return to their homes.

Really, like I said, Zatar al-Garbiya notwithstanding, nobody else is able to have any progress. So it's really not very encouraging. Also not encouraging to see that Hezbollah is potentially taking steps to kick off another round of fighting with Israel if another round with Iran takes place.

Again, Hezbollah, I have said many times on this podcast, they are simply an Iranian proxy in Lebanon who tries to present themselves as pro-Lebanese. They're not. They will let the country burn on behalf of their buddies in Tehran.

And unfortunately for the Lebanese people, that has very much been the case for all of this campaign. But not to get off on a tangent about Lebanese affairs, one of the biggest things that's facing Israel right now is the draft, and I don't think that Eisenkant's really going to be able to address this one very well either.

He may need the support of Haredi parties, so that being Shas and UTJ, both of whom have made opposition to drafting yeshiva students, so basically Jewish students studying at religious schools who do so full time.

These guys take their quite seriously and view serving in the army as basically being a secularizing force.

Many of them, when you talk to them I was, I was in the country back a few years ago and I was able to talk to a number of Brady men in the city of Benight Brock when this was very much still an issue, they see the army as being this like force that steals people, where they have their way of life, they want to do things a certain way, and the army expects

Them to just drop that.

And so Israel has tried to sort of tweak things a bit, so they have Haredi-specific divisions where people can balance yeshiva study with military service a bit better.

But it hasn't really won many people over. And so if Eisencott is now going to be dependent on the Haredi parties himself, which BB was, who was also dependent on, by the way, we're in the same situation as we were before where, okay, they're going to have to find some draft exemption or some way of squaring the circle.

I don't really see any great way of doing it.

But even if you were to exclude the Haredi parties, I also don't really see much of a path there either, because if you start jailing people for draft dodging, it's going to only further polarize Haredi Jews against IDF, many of whom have made very clear they are willing to go to jail rather than serve forcibly in the army.

So I don't see much of a way forward on this, but I also don't really see how they can afford not to find something to do because Haredi Jews in the country are more and more of the population. These guys have a lot of kids.

And when you have such a huge percent of the population right now, I believe a third of Israeli first graders are Haredi, which is an absolutely astonishing statistic. This is this used to be a tiny fraction of the country. And they have really exploded in terms of how much of the country they represent.

So the and it's only going to continue going on from here. I don't see how they can with how they can get past their draft challenges and their manpower shortage, without finding some way to address it. And then one other question about the possible transition to an island or a government.

What do you make of his geopolitical priorities in a way that may diverge from Netanyahu and kind of his Israeli approach that we've been watching for so long, because obviously Israel faces a number of different challenges and around the region.

So does he have kind of a meaningfully difference, I guess, threat evaluation and like, whether it's a ranking or prioritization, things that he might see as threats to Netanyahu didn't, things that Netanyahu was always stressed that he doesn't so on, like what kind of a different approach may is that. So there's going to be a lot of PR differences.

So Netanyahu has basically said the world is going to hate us because they already hate us and there's nothing we can do about it. So I even try, at least for the last three or four years, Israel's reputation throughout the world has really fallen throughout the last few years of his premiership and arguably through much of his premiership.

And, you know, this is just not something he's given much care to other than to say, look, this is nothing new.

So fair enough. I mean, if that's his line, he's sticking to it. Eisencott is not going down that route.

So the easiest barrier or easiest hurdle to clear here being settler terrorism in the West Bank. Israel could stop this tomorrow if they wanted to, or at least seriously curtail it. The chutzpah that a lot of these guys have in the West Bank is just so

They know that many in the current Israeli government, which does not represent entirety of Israel by any means, they just know that the national security minister has their back itamar ben-gavir unfortunately they know that he's just going to continue to back them and they're not afraid of telling the idf this by the way so there was an attack on a mosque

Late last year in the west bank and on the mosque, they wrote not in Arabic, but in Hebrew threats and taunts, not to Palestinians, but to the IDF saying that they are not afraid of Avi Bluth.

Avi Bluth being the IDF commander in the West bank, the man overseeing all of this, they know that they can just get away with it.

And Avi Bluth is relatively powerless to actually put a stop to it because the man running the nation's police, which is separate from the army, so some nuance there needed, but the man running the country's police, National Security Minister Itamar Bengavir, has outright said he wants to stop persecuting the settlers for some of their crimes.

So that would be the lowest barrier, just getting rid of Ben-Gavir. Get somebody else cracked down on this. It's going to be night and day difference in the West Bank.

Certainly that does not address the underlying issues, but it does take some of the pressure off where you're seeing just some of the most horrifying images. So, I mean, journalists are just getting beaten up.

A journalist from the Washington Post who is herself Jewish came under attack by Israeli settlers in the west bank they beat her i believe with clubs and there was another attack on an nbc journalist crew who did this who did the same just like vicious stuff and again this is relatively straightforward to put a stop to.

That would be the first one. Lebanon would potentially be the second, getting some continued rollout of the country. Again, my biggest concern here being Hezbollah is going to continue to prop up Iran.

It's going to be very difficult for an Eisenhower premiership to withdraw from Lebanon if Hezbollah is still doing Hezbollah things. And the third being Gaza, I don't see much changing on this, to be honest.

Eisencott has promised to oust Hamas politically from the Strip within a year and a half, i believe but you know that's that's something that sounds great on campaign ads i don't really know what else he'd do differently than bb and i don't really see any possibility of them just like withdrawing again right now israel occupies about 60 of the strip i don't

See an israeli pm really pulling out yeah the charge into here didn't you know just fallish this seems to be an experiment to so many other you know points of conflict to the region but then again right as you've said you know there's really not this huge like traditional divide in Israel in the same way that you would see out of Afri's words.

You know, the story of right versus left is, you know, completely variant views of how to manage foreign affairs, things like that. I can say it's much more kind of a unified in some of the directions that the rest of the world tends to find more concerning. And I think a lot of people give credit.

So yeah, not necessarily our most discouraged encouraging conclusion, but you know, one of them speaking of the third ones, we're just about a time for the episode, so I do want to ask anything else that we should be keeping our eye on across the middle East for the next week until we reconvene here?

Well, certainly the Israeli premiership going to be the big one for me. Any strikes that we may or may not see, we actually saw a very limited strike by the way right before the midterm on Keshav Island.

I don't really know what the whole point of that was. But it was relatively not covered to my surprise.

And then there was, it didn't really escalate from there, but we will see ultimately if old Pete Hegseth gets his way there yeah a little bit of background on that Kesham strike Tim I understand there were a few US planes flying control in that area one of them got a signal that there had been a radar lock from Iranian surface-to-air systems on that island

So the u.s. Was solid with a direct bombing attack against those systems and I believe that was for nothing out of it.

Oh That's for me. I do have two things that I'm watching We haven't gotten the chance to talk about today.

The first one of course is in Yemen where the movies continued to Encircle the sphere ties some good news there recently a Red Cross convoy of, I believe, four trucks were able to get some desperately needed medical aid into the city, so really life-saving stuff.

So, like, critical care packages that they give that, like, basically pre-built, like, toolkits to deal with war wounds basically so then that in itself is encouraging and hopefully that might you know lead the way to some other humanitarian aid going in the future and then limited success in counteroffenses by Yemeni forces in that area so they've been able

To hold the Houthis back from getting control of this nearby mountain, which would allow them to basically kind of sink down into the fishbowl of the city itself.

They've been able to prevent with the access to a number of different strategic areas. At the same time, they are still not able to break through in any meaningful way.

As evidence of this, the Houthis now are continuing on another axis, leading from Taiz southward to the de facto capital city of Aden, where the Yemeni internationally recognized government is currently based, after they lost the capital city over a decade ago.

The Houthis are now within 80 kilometers of the city of aden according to reuter's story earlier this week so deeply concerning stuff there and then in iraq still iraqi kurdistan obviously borders iran it is the last really robustly autonomous Kurdish area in the Middle East after the Syrian autonomous territory of Rojava was such a thing earlier this year

After Turkey's decision to deal with the TK and Iran, of course, has never really allowed any kind of Kurdish autonomy on its own soil.

Today, the Iraqi Kurdistan government split, so basically they've been in a state of deadlock since 2024, where they elected this new, I believe it was a new parliament that was very controversial and they didn't come together, the folks who are currently in charge of Iraqi Kurdistan called them together for the first time since election the other day, which

Then set off this whole internal schism, and it looks like Iraqi Kurdistan is now dividing.

All of this comes in context to continual strikes by Iran against that area where Iran is very concerned that there may be Kurdish paramilitary elements that would try and stage some kind of ground operation in Iran.

So it may still be happening in Iraqi Kurdistan, which is one of the more important kind of stabilizing areas for Iraq and the wider Middle East. So we'll keep an eye on that, and we'll bring more updates depending on what happens there.

So with that, I just wanted to give a quick thanks to anybody listening if you are at this point in the podcast and you are all certainly one of our premium subscribers on fronts.co if so thank you very much for allowing us to do what we do is supporting our work here on home fronts war fronts defense fronts everywhere else we're looking to start up in the

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