Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 22: A new dawn in the Middle East?

Episode Date: June 22, 2025

The United States has struck the Iranian nuclear program, marking a watershed moment for the region.It will take days to determine the scale of the damage and many years to understand the implications of President Trump’s decision. But a few things are already clear. A new relationship was established between the US and its ally Israel that defined a new security architecture for the American-led alliance worldwide. Israel did the heavy lifting, suffered the blowback, and only because it was willing to fight successfully itself was then able to call on America’s unique capabilities. Taiwan, take note. Russia’s European neighbors, ditto. Be ready and able to fight, and America will help. But America will no longer fight for you as in the past.This episode is dedicated to the memory of Willy Field by his family. Willy Field was born Willy Hirschfeld in Bonn, Germany and is perhaps the only survivor of a Nazi death camp who managed to survive, escape and return to German soil in a British tank. His story of disaster, recovery and frontline heroism against Nazi Germany is a testament to over a million brave Jewish soldiers who fought the Nazis in the Allied armies.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠ www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠. If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at ⁠[e-mail]⁠.A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Hello, everybody. Welcome to yet another quick and dirty special episode of Ask Haviv Anything. It seems like in the last few weeks it's been nothing but special episodes because events have been very dramatic and dramatic events have followed quickly one after another. But I don't think there's been an event as dramatic as what happened last night in my lifetime, certainly not in the Middle East. What happened last night was that the United States joined the Israeli air campaign against the Iranian nuclear program. the B-2 bombers with its famous massive ordinance penetrators, those enormous 30,000-pound bunker busters, bomb Fordo Natanz Isfahan took out many of the things that are still left in those facilities. We don't quite know how badly things are in those places,

if they're completely destroyed or if there's quite a bit left. Fordo was built for nothing else but to resist aerial bombardment, and so we still don't know the scale of the damage. But Trump was very clear last night. He said, this is just the beginning if Iran doesn't come to the table and strike a deal in which it has no enrichment, in which it does not have the path to a nuke. It was an enormous change from anything we have seen in the past from the United States. And it probably has dozens of ramifications. We're going to be trying to understand what just happened for months and, of course, for many, many years going forward.

It was a pivot. It was a pivot in the history of the Middle East. It was a pivot in the strategic calculations and the strategic architecture of just about everybody in the region. I want as a sort of first response, if you want to know my really just initial real-time views, there was a wonderful live stream with the free press with me and Mark Dubowitz and Mike Duran and Amit Segal and Eli Lake and Matthew Continetti and Barry Weiss, you know, as the MC overseeing it all, and we all kind of laid out our views, our thoughts, our concerns, our fears. There was some disagreement.

There was some real concern going forward because we have entered an unknown territory. We don't know what Iran will do. Iran itself is trying to figure out what it's going to do. And Iran still has the capacity to cause a tremendous amount of damage to international shipping lanes, to Israel itself, to some of America's allies, to oil, production to oil prices around the world. So everything is still very much moving and shifting. I want to lay out, however, four very useful things to think about, I think, going forward, just to lay them out so that you have them in hand when you're trying to analyze

and understand developments as they develop. Point one, I'll be making four points. Everything was telegraphed. The Iranian regime refused to see it. Every single thing that happened here had happened before and recently and to an Iranian ally, including the American assault, including the Israeli campaign, including the depth of penetration of the Mossad, all of it. And so I want to talk about a regime that placed ideology before strategy, and I want to talk about the costs of it. And in some ways, this is, you know, obviously celebrating the downfall of a terrible enemy that wants to murder my people. But in other ways, it's also a cautionary tale. And it's a cautionary trail really worth learning from

because the great march of folly of human civilizations has a new actor, a new character in that long play, which is this Iranian regime. It may survive, it may partly recover. It drove its country into a bad place, and it drove itself into a catastrophic place. And that's worth looking at and understanding why it did that. To understand the Iranian weakness is also to understand

maybe some of the strengths that are left. It's a valuable lesson. Not for the fun of it, not for the hubris of an enemy defeated, but literally for the lesson, and maybe to understand if there's still strength left in this enemy. Everything was telegraphed and they refused to see it. Point two, what we just saw last night was the latest iteration of how the U.S. Israel relationship actually works.

And it isn't Israeli dependence on America. It's the opposite. It's Israeli independence that makes it a valuable. ally for America, and that makes America routinely, every time, decade after decades, since Kennedy, come to Israel's aid. And I want to tell you how that arc works, and I want to tell you why a lot of the rhetoric on the American right about Israel dragging America into a war misunderstands America and misunderstands Israel and misunderstands that relationship. And if you have that toolkit of being able to go to Google and search that specific,

Kennedy sale of the Hawk missiles to Israel in 1962, why he sold them, how that happened, what caused the very first serious act in an Israeli-American military strategic relationship, then you will understand just how profoundly silly some of the conversation about Israel is today on the American right. And I want to lay that out. There are fantastic arguments for America to pull back a bit from its policing of the world. It's protecting of the world. I respect Americans who make those arguments. I'm talking specifically about people who make specific arguments about the American-Israeli relationship

that simply aren't the history of it or how it actually functions in real time. They will be disappointed again in the future because of this misunderstanding, because they themselves, like the Iranian regime in many ways, put ideology before strategy and before analysis and diagnosis. So I want to lay out that history. Point three, ideas can die. the idea of this regime can die and it's well in its way to being killed

and that should be our focus to kill the idea and we should also understand that that will have costs for the Iranian people and we should talk about it and point four October 7 was always going to end this way this was where it was going to end and that's something that luckily I said 20 months ago and I reiterate it today and I'm going to just finish up with a comment on that

because that is the, we'll call it the Israeli perspective on what just happened. Before we get into those explanations, before we get into those, before we get into those explanations, I want to just tell you about our sponsor and the absolutely astonishingly beautiful and inspiring dedication that they have offered us for this episode. Thank you to the sponsor, and I have shared this dedication with my children. This episode is dedicated to the memory of Willie Field by his family. Willie Field was born Willie Hirschfeld in Bonn, Germany. He is perhaps the only survivor of a Nazi death camp who managed to survive, escape,

and then returned to German soil in a British tank. On the morning after Kristallnacht in November 1938, Willie was arrested by the Gestapo and transported to the Dachau concentration camp. He survived for five months in the concentration camp until his former, employer, a Jew who had himself escaped to England, was able to secure for him a travel permit to the UK. Willey was released from Dachau and left Germany with his cousin and twin sister and arrived in the UK in the spring of 1939, shortly before the start of the war. But as a German living in Britain, he was viewed with suspicion by the authorities and subsequently deported to

an internment camp in Australia at the beginning of the war and held there for over a year. The British government eventually realized that German Jewish refugees were an asset rather than a liability, and Willie was sent back to England. When he finally returned to England in 1941, Willie volunteered for the British Army, becoming a tank driver in the Royal Armoured Corps just in time for D-Day, where he drove his tank onto the beaches of Normandy and fought his way across Europe with his regiment. While fighting in Holland, Willie's tank was knocked out. Everybody in his tank was killed. He was the only survivor.

He was sent back to England for six weeks of recuperation, and then sent back to the front, given a new tank, and told to carry on, which he had no fear of doing. At this point, Willie was still only in his early 20s. He fought for 11 months on the perilous front lines in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, where the average life expectancy for a tank driver was mere weeks. Willie participated in the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and in the Berlin Victory Parade of 1945 held by the time. the Allies. He later settled in London, where he met and married his wife Judy. The couple

had two sons. Willie lived in London until he passed away at the age of 91 in May 2012. But his memory lives on through the stories he used to tell his family and which they have chosen to share with us through this podcast. Thank you. It is a privilege to be part of keeping alive the memory of such an incredible man, who in the worst moments in human history rose to the challenge, fought back and built a new life. Thank you to the family. Over a million Jews fought the Nazis in various armies in World War II.

One of the bravest of them was Willie Field. Part 1. Everything was telegraphed, but the regime refused to see. Folks, the United States used B-2s. They traveled 30 hours to the Middle East from Missouri, and they dropped the bunker busters. on targets that Iran had helped build and plan and pay for. And that was on October 16 of last year.

It was under the Biden administration. President Biden authorized the B-2s to strike five hardened underground weapon storage facilities near Sana'a and Saada in Yemen. These were places where the Houthis stored missiles, they stored components, and they used them to state. those attacks, the ongoing attacks on commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea and in the Gulf of Aden that were causing havoc to international shipping, basically stopping up the Suez Canal. These were exactly what we just saw. They took off from Missouri. They never stopped. They never landed in Guam or anywhere else. They traveled east. They hit Yemen and they flew back. The point of bombing, there were U.S. carrier strike groups in the region to fight back against the Houthis. The point of Biden specifically authorizing the B2s was to send a message to Iran. And Iran heard the message.

They could not have heard the message. The argument that this was the point the Americans were making was put out by the American government, by every media outlet out there. It was certainly covered that way in Al Jazeera. And the Iranians looked at it, saw it, understood it, and did do anything. There are many other examples of things that were telegraphed. Mossad penetration of Chesbalah, the way that Chesbalah officials, leaders, from the chief of staff, Fuad Shuker down to Nasrallah himself, no matter where they hid, no matter how much they ran, no matter how much they opened the new, you know, the most secretive place and then the most secretive backup place, the Mossad always knew. And it hunted them

down. And it went after that decapitation strategy of going for the leadership because it worked and it shattered Chesbalah's fighting capacity. Why did Iran think Israel wouldn't have been preparing the same thing for Iran? Ukraine demonstrated what can be done with drones. It hid drones inside trucks that drove across the Russian countryside and then the drones took off from those trucks and hit a large part of the Russian strategic bomber fleet. And they were using incredibly low-tech, cheap tech, and just the general infrastructures of a country. Well, the Mossad, using 3D printers, had factories building out drones that it then used to strike at missile launchers and other strategic facilities and weapon systems of the Iranian regime

in the first day of the Israeli strike. If the Ukrainians could do it, why couldn't the Israelis do it? I've said this before, and I'll be saying this for many years. And the lesson I think is important. Everything was telegraphed, but they did not believe it could happen to them. And they did not believe it could happen to them because they kind of thought of themselves as bigger and smarter and more serious and more established than Hezbollah. Bigger, smarter, more serious, and more established than what? The Russian military? Bigger, more serious, more established than the Houthis of Yemen.

But maybe the real lesson is that if ideological loyalty is the primary qualification for promotion, you're going to produce a military and an intelligence community that just doesn't see the signs even when they're being brought right up to their noses. Be a meritocracy, seek out disagreement. That's something that a dictatorship fundamentally, especially an ideologically defined dictatorship, like the Iranian dictatorship of the Ayatollahs

of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, won't be able to do ever. That's a foundational weakness because loyalty is the only thing that matters. is the most important thing that matters. Their obsession with ideological purity and loyalty made them blind. And that's an important piece of this story, because the B2 bombings were yet another of the same story

of a thing that had happened, of a thing they knew the enemy could do, of a thing that they couldn't quite articulate why the enemy wouldn't do, and then the enemy did. There's a lesson there. Point two. what you just saw last night was the latest iteration of how the U.S. Israel relationship actually works. It isn't

Israeli dependence on America. It is the opposite. It's Israeli independence. And using that Israeli independence, I want to argue, America essentially invented a new security architecture for the world. And it's the old architecture it has always had with Israel. Israel is a very different

ally from Japan or Germany or the Philippines or Taiwan or many, many other countries that depend South Korea, you name it, that depend on the United States. Israel does not depend on the United States. And Israel's enemies need it to be dependent on the United States and constantly argue that it's dependent on the United States. And mostly they argue that because of their own egos, because Israel has yet to be destroyed. Israel keeps surviving and keeps triumphing and keeps going and becoming

stronger after every war. It did it when it had French weapons. And then it did it when it had American weapons. And before that it did it with Soviet weapons in 48. It keeps doing it. and the patron, the argument that there's always a patron and it's the only reason they survive is the argument that we Arabs, we Muslims, we college campus progressives who have yet to destroy Israel, whoever the group is,

Israel's survival needs an explanation that doesn't hurt the ego, an explanation that doesn't undermine the ideology, which says that this thing has to disappear because we've decided it's colonialists, so all colonialist projects fail. It doesn't fail. this argument that there must be a patron fundamentally misunderstands the U.S. Israel relationship and how the U.S. Israel relationship has now become the archetype, the model, the paradigm

for U.S. security architecture for the world. And I want to lay that out and explain it a little bit, and then hopefully I'll convince you, because this is big. And I think this is foundational to the Trump doctrine. This is foundational to Trump's brand of isolationism. The United States can still secure the world, protect the world, and police the world without having to secure, protect, and police it. And the basic idea is the ally does the heavy lifting, the local ally, and the United States

comes in to deliver the coup de grouse. That's exactly America's value added, without all the massive cost to the American people, the American economy, American blood, and treasure. And the Israelis have just demonstrated what that relationship could be. And Trump was convinced by the Israelis, not by Israelis, not by Israeli, begging, not by Israeli dependence, but by Israeli independence, by the American desire to make this a cleaner war, a war that doesn't deteriorate into all kinds of other things, by the American desire also to be part of the great triumph and pivot of the Middle East

and taking out this great danger that just about everybody in the Middle East sees, except for the ideologues in the West who pretend not to understand. And so there's a new relationship here. It's the old relationship between the U.S. and Israel, but the U.S. Israel relationship, it's not going anywhere. It has just become that fundamental kind of relationship to my Taiwanese friends and South Korean friends and Japanese friends and European friends. You face enemies. You face it in America that doesn't want to fight for you. It will fight for you if you can fight for yourself. That's the point. And I want to tell you that it has always been thus.

What do I mean by it has always been thus? America first started supporting Israel militarily in 1962. With Kennedy's approval of the sale of Hawk missiles to, that's Hawk stands for homing all the way killer, hawk missiles, anti-aircraft missiles to Israel. It was the first major U.S. sale of advanced weapons to Israel, and it was a whole new day that would go on to fundamentally redefined Israeli military capabilities and the U.S. Israel relationship. the Hawk missile was a radar-guided surface-to-air missile that could target aircraft at medium altitudes. That means that it could target the brand-new migs that the Soviets were supplying to the Egyptians, to the Syrians, to the Iraqis.

It means that the Israelis now had answers. This is five years before the six-day war. This is, you know, not many years since Israel was a third-world economy. It still in some ways was. and the enemy was being supplied by America's great enemy. Israel took the side of America, clung to the side of America, even when America didn't reciprocate, even when America didn't support it,

even when President Harry Truman, who for religious and personal reasons, actually had tremendous sentimental attachment to the New Jewish state, recognized its existence within 11 minutes of its declaration of independence, but then for tactical, strategic and diplomatic reasons, placed it under a military arms embargo for the duration of its most dire existential crisis,

which is the 48 war. The Israelis could not buy American weapons or British weapons and had to essentially get weapons from the Soviets. And in Israel that had a Soviet weapons supplier that allowed it to survive that crucible of its founding war and the invasion of surrounding Arab armies, that Israel,

still clung to the American camp in the Cold War. And Israel deeply socialist, internally, still clung, with a socialist government, with some communist ministers, still clung to the American side in the Cold War. What Israel loves about America, what Israelis love about America, isn't that America likes them back,

isn't that America supports them, isn't that America hands them weapons. They love America when America is embargoing them. What they love about America is that they are aware, and we've talked about this, the hobbits of Europe, they are aware that America has built out a world order that is safer and better and more prosperous and more protected than any period in human history.

And that means the Israelis will always appreciate America, even if America doesn't reciprocate that appreciation. And that sense that the Israelis are allies made it possible to have a military strategic relationship, but would actually spark the military strategic relationship with Kennedy in 1962 was not Israeli need, was not Israeli begging.

The Israelis didn't come to Washington, hat in hand, and the Americans had took pity on them. It was the opposite. It was somewhat that the Soviets were arming Israel's enemies, and by default that made Israel an American ally, and if the Soviets arming the enemies of a pro-American country defeated that pro-American country,

that would be a bad precedent in the Cold War. All the other American allies would see it and say, wait a second, are we safe under the American umbrella? That was a part of it. That was part of the discussion. It was Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. But more fundamental than that was the very simple point that Kennedy suspected that Israel was building a nuclear weapon, that the Israeli nuclear program was well underway at Dimona.

And Kennedy was pressuring the Israelis to open that facility to U.S. inspections. And the Israelis had actually acquiesed and allowed the inspectors. to come through, although it was a very heavily managed visit. The Israelis had a doctrine that Moshe de Jan would come to refer to as the wounded tiger. You push us up against a wall, we might do crazy things, we might do things that don't make sense, we might do things that therefore you can't predict. That inability to predict us makes us doubly dangerous. So don't push us up against a wall.

You don't put your hand out, and you certainly don't come with weapon in hand. weapon in hand at a wounded tiger because you don't know what it's going to do. That wounded tiger was developing nukes and Kennedy had a couple of bad options. Pressure Israel to the point where it doesn't have nukes, then the Israelis will feel more vulnerable as the Soviets were arming all the countries around them. Israel had not yet gone through 67. It did not yet know it was a regional power. It did not yet understand that the Arab countries were hollow from within, that they had these incompetent and deeply corrupt dictatorships, whereas the Israelis were building out serious institutions

that could actually build proper militaries and functional competent institutions. We didn't know that yet. And so 1962 was a moment of great vulnerability, and this turn to the idea that we needed a nuclear defensive umbrella was something that Israelis felt profoundly. So the Americans could try and pressure us to let go of it, but all of our vulnerability would make that probably not,

tenable, or the Americans could take the opposite attack and win everything they want, which is the bear hug, embrace the Israelis, arm the Israelis, guarantee qualitative military edge for the Israelis over their enemies, make the Israelis feel safe, make that alliance close, make the tactical and strategic collaboration very, very tight-knit. And then you can see everything the Israelis are doing. You know what they're doing. You know what they're planning, because they're talking to you, constant. about it because you're on the ground in Israel coordinating everything because you're handing them

the weapons and that's a kind of control it's a kind of way of mediating Israeli action because of Israeli independence because of Israeli capabilities mediating that Israeli behavior in the Middle East in ways that don't hurt American interests in the Middle East. Israeli and American interests align quite well but not perfectly, not always, sometimes not well at all as American and Israelis perceive it. The bear hug has always been seen as the best way to manage that problem. You have some of these anti-Israel, I don't know what they call themselves, libertarian, right-wing, patriot, woke right, whatever you call them,

who argue essentially that America is stupid, and that random sentiment that it has nothing to do with America's own well-being and interests has driven an American support for a country that has only hurt American interests. I disagree. I don't think America is stupid. I don't think America ever was stupid. It makes mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes.

That doesn't make you stupid. I think there was deep logic behind the Israeli-American strategic relationship. And I think that people who dislike Israel a little too much, as Woody Allen once said of anti-Semitism, it's disliking Jews more than is absolutely necessary. People whose animus against Israel

is just a prejudice, not a strategic argument, they need America to be stupid in its support for Israel because if there's deep strategic interest here, then they're kind of stuck with a support for an Israel they don't like. After Kennedy came Lyndonby Johnson, he expanded the arms sales massively. Israel would then begin buying tanks and aircraft, and Richard Nixon would already establish a proper strategic alliance. Richard Nixon, by the way, whose own personal views about Jews were anti-Semitic, established a proper military alliance with Israel.

discouraging Israel from going nuclear was key. And attempting to gain transparency of what's happening in the demononuclear reactor was key. And Israel being pro-American was also key. And Israel being a wildcard that America couldn't quite control its willingness to be independent was also key. Israelis have fretted a great deal over the last week over whether America would join or not join. And I had suggested the argument from rooted in this history, the very simple argument that at some point

if the Americans tell you wait Trump said remember Trump said I'll take two weeks to decide up to two weeks to decide and I said well if the Americans think that we're going to be in a holding pattern for them we have to go it alone because if we go it alone what will that do

they will bring the Americans in now it turns out we didn't have to do that because the two-week thing that Trump said was a ruse it was part of the military intelligence tactic against Iran to make Iran not move things out of foredo to make Iran expect the Americans not to bomb. But at a larger level, that's exactly what happened. The Israeli willingness to go out alone, the Israeli willingness to deliver massive strategic successes,

that's what brought Trump in. If the Israelis had hobbled along and tried to strike, but hundreds of missiles had hit the Israeli civilian front, and Israel had failed to take out launchers, failed to strike a great many of the nuclear sites, failed to decapitate half of the regime's leadership. Trump would not have joined. Trump would have pressured Israel to stop.

This posture by the Israelis, this willingness to go it alone, to do things that don't fit the calculations of others, is what first created the American strategic support for Israel. If I were Taiwan today, I would double and triple down in Taiwanese capability to face down China. You want America behind you?

sure it isn't too much American blood on the line when the war comes. Dido Japan, diddo South Korea. The way you hold America is by being able to defend yourself. America will come in and deliver its grand strategic element that it can add to your strategy because it has that scale, because it has that technology. America doesn't put boots on the ground anymore, and America's not going to bleed for anybody. And I don't blame it. Sentiment drove Truman's recognition. even then it wasn't just sentiment. There was this hope that it would solve the DP problem in Europe where the United States military was feeding and paying

for a quarter million Jewish refugees that nobody else would take in, including Congress, which wouldn't lift the quotas, the immigration quotas from the 1920s. So there was this hope that this newly established Jewish state in 1948 would finally end the DP problem that Truman had and saw as a real headache and as a real moral problem. But that didn't mean Truman would support Israel militarily.

The military alliance has nothing to do with sentiment. They hold us close. They enhance our capabilities. They offset their enemies by offsetting our enemies. Iran was backed by China. What was true then about the Soviets is true today about the Chinese. But at the end of the day, the Beir-Hug is about the fact that strategic closeness, strategic intimacy, is the best way to keep a close eye on Israeli plans and Israeli actions.

Sentiment won't get you that strategic sense. support. Only self-interest will do that. Truman loved Israel, loved the idea of it religiously. That didn't stop him from an arms embargo. Love of Israel, folks, won't prevent the destruction of Israel by its enemies. And hatred of Israel won't drive the destruction of Israel, because hatred of Israel tends to correlate with incompetence and an inability to fight a war in a serious, competent way. Strategic usefulness matters. Independence of action matters. So I disagree with the anti-Israel people who think America is stupid. It's not stupid.

It didn't build its geopolitics on sentiment. In the end, reality wins. And all the ideologies and all the screaming and all the debates and all the insane algorithmic, you know, mind-bending, reality warping insanity of social media. Reality, hard, simple reality on the ground will win. What mattered in this war was Israeli competence. Israeli competence doesn't care about whether or not you like Israel or hate Israel, believe one conspiracy or another, have one theory of history or another.

The competence is fundamental and it comes from deep structural places. And Iran's incompetence is fundamental. It comes from deep structural places. And all the cover for it by all the ideologues of American far left and far, none of it mattered. None of it will ever matter. Reality always wins. Point three. Ideas can die. This is related to the idea that reality always wins.

Ideas can die. It is not true what people tell us about the Hamas war. The Hamas war is a whole different kind of war. The civilian suffering there is massive. It's real, it's profound, and it's a big part of why that war needs to be resolved as quickly as possible. But not without achieving the one thing Israel needs from it and the one thing that Gaza needs from it. Because if Hamas survives in Gaza, there's no rebuilding of Gaza. Gaza will be fighting more wars, more catastrophic wars, the rebuilding of Gaza, any capacity of the world to pressure the Israelis on Gaza. Anything you want good for Gaza depends on Hamas being removed. So I don't have an easy way out of the Gaza problem, but I do have an obvious need to acknowledge profoundly the suffering in Gaza.

But the fundamental point is that the world told Israelis constantly, all the grade and the wise, all the pundits, all the academics, all say the same thing. You can't kill an idea. You cannot destroy Hamas. You can kill an idea. Pan-Arabism was an idea, driven by Nasser. We talked about it on this podcast. And united the Arab states against Israel. In a way, they had not been united in 1948, but were united by 1956.

And the Israeli sard is an existential threat. The whole world had suddenly become much, much more dangerous, because the enemies had all united all around them. To the point where the Syrians and the Egyptians actually formed the United Arab Republic. a single state for a while. It fell apart very quickly. It never really functioned. But the ideology, that pan-Arabist idea that drove it under Nassar, it was powerful, and it looked

like the future, and it looked like it might have the ability to destroy Israel. And then the Israeli military and the Arab militaries met in the desert, met in the field, and the Israelis won spectacularly against these Arab militaries, because the ideology couldn't compensate for all the problems of these dictatorships, the incompetences of these dictatorships. And so the idea died because it could not deliver the thing that it itself had posited as the test of its truth and power and relevance, which is the destruction and defeat of Israel, because it couldn't deliver, the idea itself was proven wrong. That happened also after the Algeria war ended in 1962, an FLN, a national liberation

in front of Algeria terror war against the French colonization project in Algeria. There was a brutal war. The terrorism was horrific and constant, and the French response was even more brutal, probably half a million dead civilians among the Muslim Algerians, over the course of eight years of war. And then in 1962, all the French got up and left. A million people got up and left. And the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO was founded,

about a year and a half later, in Cairo, modeled on the FLN in 1964 and said, wait a second, we can do that to the Jews. We can do that to Israel. And they embarked in a what was essentially three-decade terror war from Lebanon, from Jordan. Airelines were hijacked. And that terror war, that anti-colonial terror war modeled on the Algeria war, was also defeated. The idea was defeated. The idea is nowhere, except in Western elite college campuses.

which is the only place where 70-year-old ideas that have been disproven in reality can still survive. That idea is gone. That's no longer a strategy of anybody serious in the Middle East. And now we have this special brand of revolutionary Shiism advanced by Khomeini at the founding of the Revolution of the Islamic Republic and now by Ali Khomeini. This idea can die. this idea made the destruction of Israel the proof of concept

the proof of its ethos the proof that if the Shia organized properly they can do what the Sunnis have failed to do for a hundred years and therefore the Shia are right and the Sunnis are wrong they don't even care so much it's not even pure anti-Semitism although there's a lot of anti-Semitism that just the dirtiest classic most ridiculous and pathetic version of it I mean, Holocaust denial is a regime ideology

under Ahmadinejad and among many people today still in that regime. But it was about Shiism, and it's about the revolution, and it's about how the Israelis, Israel was the smallest and weakest thing that had ever pushed Islam back. And so that was the first thing Islam had to defeat, and whoever defeated it was the true Islam. It was this kind of, it's profound,

but it's also a little bit strange to outsiders, maybe silly. That idea that focused, regime's energies and vast hundreds of billions of dollars on the proxies, that idea can die. All it has to do is fail. All it has to do is be defeated. And the Israelis in the last 20 months have defeated it. They have broken the back of every proxy. The revolutionary Shia idea lies in ruins everywhere and everywhere that this Islamism has

touched. It has broken. Chisbalah was gutting the Lebanese state long before October 6th. what the Houthis have done to Yemen. No enemy of Yemen has ever done to Yemen. And now we've defeated Iran. Now, what does that mean we've defeated Iran? Iran is still there. It has massive strategic depth.

It has a land area, I think 60 times the size of Israel and a population, nine times Israel. Iran is still there and still capable. But the regime, and everything the regime saw is its symbols and all of its bravado and all the things it was proud of, and all the strategic weaponry you thought. Basically, the only thing that regime has is that missile arsenal. It doesn't have a functional air force. It doesn't have a serious navy. It doesn't have a real military in the sense that Westerners have militaries.

What it has is the conviction that nobody will attack it because it's sheer bluster and general Western aversion to war is going to keep it safe. And these strategic weapons in the form of the missile arsenals, The Israeli Air Force over Iran has done many, many different things. One of the major ones, maybe the single biggest effort, has been to take out missile launchers. Because the Israelis realized it's going to be hard to track down all the thousands of missiles in the arsenal. Some of them buried deep underground, some of them hidden in secret places. But you can track launchers by the launch.

You can track launchers with intelligence. And you can create a bottleneck of launchers so that it doesn't matter how many missiles they have. they can't launch them in any real numbers. Well, if two-thirds or three-quarters of the launchers are now gone, which is the estimate in Israel, Iran can have as many missiles as it wants. It'll have to throw them with their own bare hands to actually get them to go anywhere.

And this is the point. The regime had one last great arena, one last great asset, and the Israelis have now systematically been denying them that asset in their ability to respond to the Israeli strikes on their nuclear program and missile production capabilities. and that was the missiles. And so the regime is now being systematically disarmed. On top of seeing its nuclear program, its crown jewel being destroyed,

it's being systematically disarmed. And a regime that has spent 46 years making sure of nothing except that it will survive, co-opting and gutting and weakening every other power base in Iranian society to make sure that nothing can ever challenge it, not the army, not the economy, not different elites within the regime, nothing can co-opt the regime. Everything is subsumed into the regime.

That regime, who's one success in those 46 years of ruling Iran, under Khomeini al-Khamenei, their one success has been holding on to power. It's entirely possible that that regime cannot fall, simply because there's no other power base within Iran to make it fall, and nobody's invading Iran. But the Israeli war effort has done something more profound than regime change.

It has stripped the regime of its story. It made it not a redemptive religious revolutionary regime. It's now something much more petty and much more pathetic. It's just a dictatorship. It's just power for powers' sake. It's just an entrenched elite that it has the cloak of religious language but beats and murders its way to stay. in power. It has no pretense for any pursuit of religious redemption, and it has no claim

to being the vanguard of any Islamic restoration if all of its proxies and all of its strategic military assets are gone. It's only business. Some might argue this has always been. It's one and fundamental overriding concern, and it's only business anyway, but it's only business is survival. This new version of the regime that is quite likely to be the result of this operation, not regime change, but just a petty dictatorship version of the regime, even in its own story of itself, is going to struggle to survive and is going to feel more vulnerable, and is going to turn on its people with a vengeance commensurate with that sense of vulnerability. In the last round of anti-regime protests two years ago after the killing of Mahzahmini,

hundreds of people were killed, 550 people, something like that, tens of thousands were arrested. The besiege were beating and murdering people in the streets. That's going to get worse when the regime is now shorn of its most basic religious validity and feels all the more so that it has to lash out to survive. Our thoughts, our attention, international pressure should be with the people of Iran right now. If this goes south within Iran, which it's quite likely to, the world should be pressuring. in favor of the Iranian people, most of whom we know from every poll there's ever been,

don't want this regime. I'm sad to say that I don't think the international community will do that, with the exception of a few Western countries. But it should. It should. Because they're going to be the last front in this war, the Iranian people. And I wish them all the best and all the courage it will take. And I wish them success in replacing this regime with a better one, even if I'm not sure I see a path forward to getting there.

And point four, October 7 was always going to end here. Israel announced a short time before the bombing that it took out IRGC General Saeed Izadi. He was the Quds Force liaison, basically, to Hamas. He was the patron of October 7. He knew about it ahead of time. He communicated with Sinwar. He corresponded and he sent money.

He sent training. He brought people to Iran, to Hezbollah, and helped build out the capabilities that Hamas showed on October 7. On October 7, Israel woke up to the fact that the enemy was capable of launching completely suicidal wars to destroy Israel. The destruction of their own polity was a strategic force multiplier in their mind toward the destruction of Israel. It was a worthwhile price for them to pay, they believed, for this tremendous benefit of Israel's destruction, which for them is far bigger than the liberation of the West Bank. It's about the redemption of Islam,

and that's where the destruction of Gaza was worth it. And if that's how your enemies think, if that's a Chisbalah thought about Lebanon, that a great destructive war in Lebanon, because 200,000 Chisbalah missiles are falling on Tel Aviv, was part of the redemption arc of Islam, then that threat is not deterrable. And if that threat is not deterrable,

it has to be removed. And that began an Israeli move from one arena to another to systematically dismantle all of the groups, all of the ideologues, all of the missile arsenals, all of the things and the people and the ideologies around Israel that believe that its destruction is what stands in the way of redemption. Every single one of those groups has to go. And every single one of those groups systematically

has begun to be. dismantled and destroyed. And there is no logic to a war with Hezbollah by which it doesn't end in Iran. And so the war was only ever going to end with Iran. It makes no sense to fight all the wars up until now in the last 20 months if it doesn't end in removing the Iranian threat. Because Iran will launch suicidal wars for Israel's destruction, because it's not deterrable,

because if it gets a nuke, no matter what the clever think tank people say in the West, who have been unable to predict any development in the Middle East in 30 years, Iran might just use it. Sinwar is dead. Nasrallah is dead. Izadi is dead. Chamin'ei deserves to die. Iran would be a better place if he were dead.

He's the man who keeps resisting change and reform and liberalization within Iran. And any deal, any serious deal, deal that actually denies Iran enrichment and a future nuclear program and nuclear weapon. So maybe his killing is in the works. We know he's gone to ground. We know he's somewhere in some bunker. The redeems validating religious story, however, will struggle even more to survive if he is killed. If he survives, he comes out of that bunker and says, by virtue of my survival, God has told us, rebuild. Well, he has to not be able to say that.

And that regime shorn of that story will be far weaker. And if Iran has any hope for a better future, it lies in his death. and I hope that's the next step and the Israelis have said it and the Americans have said it and finally the last connection to October 7 in all of the noise and attention

on Fordo and on the Americans the IDF and the Shabak brought home the bodies of three hostages Ophra Kedar Jonathan Smerno and Shai Levinson a kid dancing at the Nova Festival a tank commander who fought back and killed Hamas terrorists

before he himself was killed and his body was taken. May their memory be for a blessing. Thank you so much for joining me. Some thoughts after one of the most astonishing moments in my life, a new Israeli-American architecture of power, architecture of global security, has been born. I hope that German military planners and Taiwanese military planners and Estonian and Korean, all the different nations, that in some way or another rely on America.

I hope they're paying attention, not just to how Israeli electronic warfare over Iran neutralizes the radars of missiles. You should pay attention to that. I understand some of those systems are for sale. But I hope you're paying attention to how Israel brings America into the war. first of all by being competent and capable itself, by shouldering the burden itself, by doing the hard and dirty work itself.

And then if you need that one special, insanely powerful, long-range strategic capability that only the Americans have the economy to produce, it'll be there for you. But America won't police the world with boots on the ground anymore, and it's right not to. So everyone else has to do their part. And the Israelis, as always in these things, are leading the way.

Thank you for joining me.