Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 23: Iran bows out

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

There's now a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. Who won the war? And what happens now?We offer some preliminary conclusions as the dust settles.This episode is sponsored by the Peters family, Tom, Shevi, Daniel, Ethan, Arielle, Yoni and David, in honor of BeLev Echad, an organization devoted to helping wounded Israeli veterans recover physically, medically and emotionally. To learn about how you too can help Israeli veterans recover, visit Belevechad.nyc.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail].A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Hi, everybody. Welcome to Ask Habib Anything. It's Tuesday, June 24. There's a ceasefire. The 12-day war between Israel and Iran is over. Everything is very preliminary. The dust hasn't settled. It was a rocky start to the ceasefire, which is very significant and we'll get into it. But I think it's not too early to already start to draw some very significant conclusions about the nature of the war, the nature of the broader conflict between Israel and Iran, what happened to each side and where they go from here. Let's get into it. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by the Peters family. Tom, Chevy, Daniel, Ethan, Ariel, Yoni, and David, in honor of Belvechad. Belvechad is a wonderful organization, and thank you for this sponsorship and thank you for this dedication to that organization to the Peters family. Imri Rung, 26, was serving in an IDF K-9 unit when he was wounded 18 months ago, clearing a booby-trapped home in Chaniunis.

The incident caused nerve damage in Imri's leg and ankle. It left him with severe, unrelenting pain. Imri had multiple surgeries in Israel, but unfortunately, doctors were not able to relieve his excruciating pain. Then Imri met Belafchad, an organization devoted to helping wounded Israeli veterans, to helping them heal. Belvichad was able to fly Imri to New York,

where doctors and specialists at NYU's center for amputation reconstruction, performed a complex special procedure not available in Israel. Thank God, the surgery is working out and 18 months of indescribable pain or receding. Over 14,000 Israeli veterans have been wounded since October 7.

Belivechad helps them recover physically, medically, emotionally. To learn more about how you too can help Israeli veterans recover, visit belivechad. n.yc. That's B.EVEchad. E-E-L-E-V-E-C-H-A-D-N-Y-C.

Thank you to the Peters family for the sponsorship and for that very important dedication. Let's get into it. The fundamental takeaway. My fundamental takeaway. How much was this in Israeli victory? What is the nature of this Israeli victory? Folks, I want to proceed my answer to that question by the simple point. War is not about the war.

You don't go to war to have a war. And forget almost everything you see or read on Twitter about this war. It isn't about who's stronger. It isn't about who's smarter. It isn't about who wins the debate over, you know, who does more damage. All of that competition stuff, that ego stuff, that national pride stuff. That's not why people go to war. War is about changing a bad reality when there are no less costly available

ways to do so. That is why wars happen. That is why people, nations go to war. How they perceive that reality, how they perceive the goal of the new reality, they want to exist after the war. Sometimes wars are deeply foolish. Sometimes wars are absolutely necessary. History is not always a kind judge on that point. The question that matters now is not, rah, ra, I'm a patriotic Israeli. By the way, you have every right to be a patriotic Israeli feeling good feelings after this war because your compatriots demonstrated competence and capabilities that have rewritten the manual on intelligence, on wartime espionage, on air war, in ways that are absolutely unprecedented in the history of warfare and in the history of espionage. Be proud. But that pride is irrelevant to our question today.

What did Israel want? Did it achieve what it wanted? What was Iran trying to prevent? What was Iran trying to preserve? Did it manage to? And what does that mean for both of the going forward. That's our question today. And in that regard, the fundamental thing you need to understand, in my view, is that this was a total and complete Israeli victory. And if you are not an Israeli friend of mine, you are rolling your eyes. And so I'm going to explain that I mean that in a very narrow and specific way. There is still some shred of a nuclear program in Iran. It might be a fairly significant shred. It might be a much tinier shred. Nobody fully completely knows. It's possible that not the people in Iran in charge of that nuclear program are not yet

fully aware of what actually survives underground in fordo, of how much is still intact. Communication was severed in many places. Things were taken out that they're only now going to start doing damage control and finding out what was taken out. Now, it's not just that I don't know. It's not just that a lot of the pundits don't know. It's not just that a lot of Western intelligence agencies may not know, it's wholly possible that Iranian nuclear officials are not fully aware yet or fully competent to yet give answers to what still remains. The IRGC is still the main military oppressing the people of Iran, and the regime is still in place, and there is no significant political force in Iran that is organized in a way that can actually launch any

kind of rebellion against the regime. Israel still faces Iran across a Gulf of 1500 kilometers as mortal enemies. And yet this was an absolute and complete Israeli victory. And the reason I think that this was an absolute complete Israeli victory, other than the occasional accusation that I am prone to optimism, which I really apologize for. I don't know how a son of a rabbi ever became prone to optimism, but there it is. Is that Iran has become, has been made by Israel a proxy of itself.

Now what do I mean by that? I wrote some of these ideas on Twitter and somebody responded with a beautiful encapsulation that's better than anything I wrote and their sentence was Iran has become what had hoped to turn Israel into, a state that can't act without fear of the sky. You know who lives like that now?

Can't act without fear of the sky? Chazmala. Iran has now signed a ceasefire or agreed in some significant way to a ceasefire. We don't know the conditions of the ceasefire. but we know the conditions Netanyahu enforced of that ceasefire in its first two hours. Iran has now signed a ceasefire that looks an awful lot like the ceasefire Israel signed with Chisbalah. That was a ceasefire on November 27, 2024.

And since that ceasefire was signed with Chisbalah, Israel has launched almost 400 strikes in Lebanon, or somewhere around 350 strikes. Everywhere where Chisbala was moving ordinance, smugged. missiles or rockets. Every new intelligence that comes in about another arsenal, hidden underground in some Lebanese village, Israel strikes. Every time Israel suspects that a Hezbollah fighter might be setting up a shooting position, it strikes. It doesn't wait to discover the Hezbollah capability and it doesn't wait to let Hezbollah rebuild. The constant suppression of Hezbollah is the strategy, is what the ceasefire means. You want real ceasefire, you want an end

to fire, stop building capabilities to destroy us. that have no meaning, no purpose, and are not part of the Lebanese state. And Lebanon tacitly loves this. The Lebanese army can't yet suppress Chisbalah by force. Lebanon doesn't have yet the coherent political unity required to impose itself as a sovereign state on all of its territory. And the fact that Israel is keeping Chisbala suppressed in this way is helping Lebanon to slowly, painstakingly drag itself along that path.

We have these indications every few weeks, every few months, that the Lebanese military is taking slightly more bold moves into formerly Chisbalah controlled villages into imposing its will in the countryside. That essentially is the new reality Israel has imposed on the Iranian regime. And you saw it in the beginning of the ceasefire. What happened as the ceasefire was declared? The President of the United States, Donald Trump, met or spoke through the ceasefire. intermediaries with the Iranians, spoke with the Israelis, and reached an agreement to launch a

ceasefire at a certain hour. And in the hours before that ceasefire, as always happens in Middle Eastern wars with Israel, it was true of the Israel-Kezbelah war back in 2006. This is just standard practice in a world where a little bit of an egotomaniacal culture dominates the question of the perception of war, where perception of victory is more important to a lot of the actors in this region, than real meaningful victory on the ground. For the Israelis,

this was the last chance to take out some IRGC installations and capabilities, and they took it. Massive air war in the last few hours. For the Iranians, it was the last chance to get another dead Israeli, to get one more picture of a broken building, so that they could blast it in Iran where internet is down,

and the regime very carefully curates what people see, and the regime has claimed massive destruction in Tel Aviv, massive destruction, and huge numbers of Israelis fleeing the country. And it wanted those images as the last thing, so that it could say we still were breaking them when they begged for it to end. And so everybody took that posture, everybody took that position, except that the moment came of the ceasefire and Israel stopped. And when the moment came of the ceasefire, an Iranian missile came in after the ceasefire.

and three hours later, another one. And then the Israelis now had to take a decision. And the decision was that the ceasefire with Iran would be the ceasefire with Chisbalah. Iran does not get to violate it, and then Israel, out of a fear of breaking the ceasefire, doesn't violate it. Either everyone keeps the ceasefire,

or nobody keeps the ceasefire. And Israeli planes apparently were already in the air when President Trump began to write on truth social, don't you dare. Don't drop those bombs, turn those fighters back. and then apparently Netanyahu and Trump spoke, and they agreed that there would have to be an Israeli response. Trump wanted to pocket the victory,

the victory being the end of the war, the great bombing of fordo, the strategic bombing of fordo that ended the war. Trump wanted that narrative, and he wanted that credit. And Israel owed it to him, because that was a very big gift to the Israelis. The Americans themselves, and Trump for a decade, have been really keen on ending that nuclear program or setting it back significantly.

It was very much part of Trump's understanding of what is good for America. You don't believe me, check out his comments on that eight years ago and six years ago and five years ago. But it was also a great gift to the Israelis, and the Israelis wanted to give it to him. But an Iranian violation can't go without an Israeli response. So Israel bombed a radar installation that was already unmanned. People had fled from it, or a lot of things right now in Iran are unmanned. Things are pretty chaotic. and everybody went home and the ceasefire is in place.

Going forward, when Trump's attention is elsewhere, not when his attention, he'll know about it, people will brief him, but when his political standing in America within the conservative debate isn't at stake, Israel will continue to suppress the Iranian nuclear program, the Iranian missile program, the Iranian proxy system actively, everywhere, with every capability it has. And it just made that clear in the moments that the ceasefire began. This was a moment that wasn't about ending the ceasefire, breaking the sea. It was about defining the ceasefire. And it was defined as essentially the Hezbollah ceasefire.

Iran has become Hezbollah. It has no control over its skies, and it has an enemy that is going to continue to suppress the capabilities that threaten that enemy. Or consider Hamas. Another proxy. Not a Shia proxy. not under Iranian control, but supported and patronized by Iran. Hamas managed to pull off October 7.

Because of Yichya Sinwar, the leader in Gaza, because of his obsessive, pathological fear of Israeli intelligence, that drove a compartmentalization that was absolutely hermetic and profoundly paranoid. And also absolutely correct. Something none of us understood until we were not. until we saw the Israeli war with Chisbalah last fall, where we began to understand just how deeply Israel had infiltrated Chisbalah, where we began to see how much Israel could chase Chisbalah leaders,

not in the first wave of decapitation assassination strikes, but a month later, when they were in their just deepest hidden hideaways, we knew all of it, and we knew where they were in real time, and we could take them out. that Israeli intelligence penetration was fully on display in the last 12 days to an extent Iran had never imagined, could not comprehend. And so now going forward, we have to assume it's going to adopt Hamas scale, Hamas style, compartmentalization. And here's the thing.

Because of that compartmentalization, Sinwar could never tell Chisbala about October 7. He took training, he took funding, he took, you know, from the Palestine, core of the Kuds Force of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They got a lot of support. There was a general understanding. They were planning something. But they couldn't tell Chisbalah it's happening because they were afraid that Chisbalah was penetrated by Israeli intelligence. They couldn't tell the Iranians. They couldn't even tell Hamas leaders in Doha. And that massively limited the actual operation they could pull off. Imagine in October 7, but six times bigger because Chisbalah's red one force in the

north launched the same operation it had already trained for. Across Israel, northern towns and cities. That was the goal. That was the great strategic plan. That's what Sinwar hoped would be triggered when he carried out October 7. But compartmentalization prevented that. Shrank down their capacity for producing

a massive strategic event. What Iran will build going forward, compartmentalized against Israeli intelligence, now that they understand the capabilities of Israeli intelligence, will necessarily be an order of magnitude smaller for that fear. An Iran that can do smaller things only.

In Iran that must watch the skies. An Iran that knows that the Israelis see it as just another Hezbollah. An Iran that once built Hezbollah as its faraway shield, far away sword, its puppet, its little thing out there that will take the blows of Israel and beat Israel at great sacrifice to itself and never allow the blows to come to Iran. Iran invented Chizbalah what Chisbalah became and now Iran has become Chisbalah

and that's the great Israeli victory can Iran pull out of this moment can Iran over the next 10 years rebuild institutionally and then rebuild capacities and rebuild installations and rebuild factories dig deeper under the mountains

and build a new nuclear program smaller but the knowledge is already there yeah of course it can China's going to help it with the ballistic missiles we have to assume but it'll all be smaller and it'll all be more fearful and more compartmentalized

and that's not a bad thing that's the Israeli victory and as I began to contemplate that after the announcement of the ceasefire I realized I started to imagine what it must feel like to be the Mossad planners back in Israel back at headquarters

coming to the office the morning, getting coffee at the coffee machine, knowing that they'd done it, knowing that they pulled off a series of covert operations unprecedented in the history of espionage and war. What were they thinking? I wondered. And then I realized, I knew what they were thinking. Every Israeli knows what they're thinking. They're already knee-deep in the next operation, because nothing has been resolved. The ball was kicked in a very long way down the court. but it's still the same game, and it's still the same court, and it's still the same enemy. The challenge is still the same challenge.

And so a lot ended, and nothing ended. And now we have to start to look at what Iran lost, what it needs to piece back together, how the Israelis are going to respond, and I think that's going to give us a sense of where things are after the war. Let's go through that quickly, and then I want to put it to be a sense. to say one last thing about the Iranian people and about Israel's next priority, which I think is Gaza. What did Iran lose? What will it try to rebuild? As I said, war is won or lost based on the reality that exists in its wake, based on how things look afterwards, how closely it matches the goals of one side or the other. Sometimes no side wins outright, sometimes one side wins outright, even if it

lost many of the battles. The National Liberation Front of Algeria lost every battle had ever engaged in with the French army. And in 1962, all the French state packed up and left with a million French citizens. The FLN won the war, even after losing every battle. A war is won or lost based on the prevailing conditions that exist when it's over. In that sense, I don't know how you can reach a conclusion other than that this was a smashing, extraordinary and historic success. And I'm going to lay that out. There are, I should say, limits to our knowledge. Okay? For example, after the U.S. bombing of Fordo in June 21, Israel followed up with strikes in and around the site. In other words, the U.S. B2 bombers, with its massive

ordinance penetrators, hit the site. And then the Israeli Air Force came in and hit the site a few more times. And that triggered a big debate about why, what was going on. It looks like it was about burying the remnants of the facility beyond the easy reach of the regime sort of repair crews, right? So not only was Fordos smashed from within by the bunker busters, but also all the paths leading into that mountain entrances leading into the entrances themselves were caved in by the secondary Israeli air strikes. But that itself triggered a debate. Was this a sign that the Fordo bombing had failed and now the Israelis to make up for the fact that a great deal of Fordo was still intact because the bunker bustage had only done 30% of the work? Remember, this is the first ever deployment in real time and real combat of those MOP bombs.

Does that mean that they only took out 30% of what's in Fordo and the Israelis to actually seal the deal or do the best they could with what was left to them because the Americans weren't going to come in for a second round? that the Israelis then bombed everything they could to further reduce the access to what remains intact in Fordo, but in fact, you know, a month of digging at the site and the Iranians will have half of what they always had, half of what they had before. Maybe. Maybe it's a sign of Fordo's failure. And maybe it's the opposite. Maybe some of the things that would naturally remain in Fordo would be the enriched uranium. And that could still be brought out, even if the Fordo bombing was a perfect success.

and what the Israelis were doing was just adding another month, another period, another expense to the rehabilitation of the program. Maybe it was just the cherry on top of a massively successful strike. Nobody really knows. Nobody knows if it's a signal of success or failure. In fact, as I said, I'm not sure anyone in Iran knows. And I kind of cleave to the old adage you often hear in Israel, that if you know you're not saying, and if you say with great confidence, you probably don't know. Israel had three goals in the war. The nuclear project, the ballistic missile arsenal, and the proxy system.

And if we go one by one systematically and very quickly, I think we're going to see how the picture emerges that even though we don't know exactly what happened with Fordo. We don't know exactly whether Iran managed to spirit out highly enriched uranium in trucks and they're now wandering somewhere in Iran between secret facilities. The IAEA tells us there are secret facilities never reported to it in Iran. Maybe stuff's over there and maybe those facilities are actually hidden from the Mossad. I don't know. But there are some things we absolutely know.

And I want to go through what we do know, because it paints a picture that even if we're missing half of it is still pretty much an unavoidable picture of catastrophic failure by Iran. Since the launch of Operation Rising Lion on June 13, Fordo was bombed, to some significant extent it's out of commission, possibly catastrophically so. At Natanz, there's a primary enrichment, uranium enrichment facility that was apparently almost entirely destroyed.

Near Isfahan, there is a centrifuge workshop used for uranium enrichment, massively destroyed. demolished, visible from the air, a lot of that damage. Not only that, but there are sort of tertiary sites around these facilities where some stuff is hidden away underneath mountains, so that when the bombing comes to the facilities, that stuff survives. A lot of those places were bombed. All of them? Do we know about all of them?

Did they bomb all? We don't know. But we know that they also bombed those kinds of facilities around the main facilities everybody knows about. And in Tehran itself, there are all kinds of locations where nuclear research, was taking place that were destroyed. Now, that's a lot. That's a lot of the core, based on all the IAA reports we know about, based on everything everybody knows, that is a significant part of the system.

Is there a secret 20% locked away somewhere? Maybe. But even if that's true, then we got two-thirds of the program. Maybe 75%. And that's a lot. The missile program. Netanyahu and many others have pointed out, that Iran has missiles, by the way, named after a massacre of Jews,

Chaibal, which is when Muhammad met Jewish tribes in a fortified oasis north of Medina in the Arabian Peninsula, and with his followers, disciples, believers, massacred them. It is not accidental that Iran named its most powerful missile, carrying a one and a half ton warhead, both that's its weight, but it's also probably roughly its explosive capacity, one and a half tons worth of TNT in explosive power, that one and a half ton warhead is named Chai Balamad is named for Muhammad's massacre of Jews. That's the ballistic missile with range to hit Israel, and that's a ballistic missile with the explosive capacity to bring down buildings in Israel. Netanyahu has said, at the beginning of this war, as part of the

explanation for why the war was necessary, that Iran was massively ratcheting up its construction of factories that can produce the missiles that can deliver these massive warheads into Israeli cities. And they were planning to reach the capacity to build 500 a month, which in three years would almost reach 20,000. Now, an arsenal of 20,000 of these, you know what, an arsenal of 10,000 of these, let's cut that number in half. If you have 250 produced a month, and over the course of just a little less than three years, 10,000 of these missiles are produced. That would be enough to overwhelm,

let's say you launch 500 a day at Israel. Let's say you have a launcher problem and you launch 200 a day at Israel. That would be enough within a few days, a very few days, four days, five days, to overwhelm Israel's stockpile of arrow interceptors. Many would, by the way, get through. It's much harder to shoot down a ballistic missile

traveling very fast over 1,500 kilometers than it is to shoot down a simpler rocket coming in from Gaza or Lebanon. The arrow system has to do a much tougher job. It's harder to intercept. The faster speed means you have to be more accurate and many more get through. It has to do a much more difficult job

than the Iron Dome system. And the percentages were much lower in the last 12 days of what could be stopped of those ballistic missiles. Not all of them the size of this Karamshar missile, but nevertheless ballistic missiles are much harder to stop. by the way, did deliver the highest percentage in the history of Israeli missile defense,

which by definition is the highest percentage in the history of missile defense generally. It's improving, but a great many still got through. If Iran begins to launch that kind of attack, over the course of a month, let's say, 10,000 can reach Israel, or in six weeks, 10,000 can reach Israel. 10,000, 1.5 ton warheads. 1.5 tons in explosive power is 15,000. is 15 kilotons of T&T in explosive power.

15 kilotons of T&T and explosive power is Hiroshima. That's the danger, that the mass production of what Iran already has the ability to produce at a smaller scale would basically be the ballistic missile equivalent of a nuclear program. And that's foundational and central to this war. Israel spent as much time bombing those facilities in those production facilities and launchers and launch sites,

whether it's in Akvaz or elsewhere, as it's spent on the nuclear program. Iran at the beginning of the war had an estimated 3,000 ballistic missiles of all sizes, not all of them, the big one, capable of reaching Israel. It now has less than 500. That is the Israeli estimate. How accurate is that? It's way beyond my pay grade to know.

Massive strikes on storage facilities, all over the country. And it's anew said at the beginning of the war that Iran was working to upgrade production so that it could go from what it is right now, which I think slightly optimistic estimates, but nevertheless, probably the best estimates we have are it can produce 50 a month.

It was trying to ratchet that up massively to 500 a month. And that has been utterly degraded and has to be basically rebuilt from scratch. The knowledge of how to build these missiles exists. There are hundreds in storage, but they're not enough to cause a strategic threat to Israel in the foreseeable future, and it has to be rebuilt literally from the factory floor on up. That's a huge change in the strategic situation of Israel.

It didn't just target the Karam Sharj, the Khybar missiles, the Qiam ones, the Fatahs, which are the hypersonics, which aren't quite what the West calls hypersonics, but for Iran, they're hypersonics. all of these facilities were heavily damaged, entry points, silo openings, massive, massive amounts of damage. An IRGC missile launch site in Tabriz was destroyed, another one in Kermansha was destroyed. You know, tremendous damage. The decapitation of the leadership. Folks, Hussein Salami, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was killed. His replacement, four days later, was killed.

The chief of staff of the Iraq. Iranian army, the regular army. Iran has two massive armies. One is the regular army that works for the government like any other state, and one serves at the pleasure of the supreme leader, of the dictator, to protect the revolution, in part against the army. In other words, in part against other power bases in Iran to protect the revolution and to project the revolution out into the world. They're the ones, the IRGC, who built out the proxy system and all the rest of it. He was killed, Muhammad Bagheri. The entire leadership of the Air Force, the entire general staff of the IRGC Air Force, was killed in a single meeting, the head of the IRGC drone unit was killed, the head of the IRGC

Missile Command was killed, the head of IRGC Intelligence was killed, and his deputy was killed. The list is very, very long. And what's really interesting is the killing of Saeedi Zadi, brigadier general in the Palestine Corps of the Quds Force, which is the IRC's division that built out the proxies. That is the Iranian general in charge of coordinating with Sinwar, with Hamas, and delivering to Hamas, all the Iranian capabilities that help contribute to Hamas' ability to carry out October 7. Now, what is interesting about that is that he was one of the very last Iranian generals taken out by Israel. To me, that suggests, and I don't have evidence for this, because I'm not privy to Mossad intelligence in Iran, but to me that

suggest that he was the one aware that he was a target. The rest were not aware that Israel would actually target the entire top brass of the Iranian military. And so he was harder to reach, but they reached him. He is the Iranian general most responsible for October 7 among all the people who live and work in Iran, and he was taken out as well. Folks, that decapitation in a regime that's deeply centralized because it's deeply concerned at all times for 46 years with loyalty of anybody who carries a big stick, with loyalty of all the armed forces to the point where it built out a second military with an Air Force and a Navy and a missile command, to make sure that they were never threatened by the regular army, that decapitation massively hindered

Iran's ability to pull back, to assess, to do damage control, to build a response, to respond in any competent way. Air defenses all over Iran were destroyed to allow for all of that to the point where Iran's air defenses are now shattered and not a single Israeli plane in 12 days of war with thousands of sorties was ever in any danger. It's an astonishing degradation of Iranian capabilities. It's essentially a denial to Iran of all its capabilities. And it came after the systematic dismantling of Iran's most important proxies. Obviously, the main one, the number one, the most important is Chazbalah. That's really important.

Chesbalah was Iran's deployable crack force. Chesbalah helped the Houthis of Yemen to develop missile capabilities. Hezbollah was sent by Iran to Syria to help defend Assad and help keep Assad in power when he was threatened by Sunni militias in the Civil War 10 years ago and more. Hezbollah had the Redwan force, the most elite force of that organization, that Iran was deploying as its crack troops all over the region. And Hezbollah was supposed to be Iran's shield and Iran's sword. But it became its albatross.

The proxies in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, Hamas itself, a Sunni organization with its own agenda, doesn't take orders from Iran, but nevertheless was embedded in the proxy system. Took money, took help. All of these were supposed to be, they were supposed to give Iran new powers, new options on the global stage,

new options in its long-running war that it had declared on Israel. And instead, they ended up imposing on Iran their own vulnerabilities. They became an albatross. They drained Iranian resources to the tunes of hundreds of billions of dollars. They drained attention.

They drained talent away. And while Iran was looking at Hezbollah and looking at Hamas and looking at Iraq and looking at Syria and looking at Yemen, thinking that's where the war with Israel was going on, Israel was patiently building drone factories in Tehran under the IRGC's nose. It was an albatross,

and it transformed Iran not into a power-wielding proxies, but into basically the strategic situation of the proxies themselves, the weaknesses of the proxies themselves were imposed on Iran by the Israelis. Iran's strategic standing in the region is unbelievably degraded.

Its credibility is shot. The silence of the Arab world, the unbelievable silence of the Arab world. There was a press release a few days in when it became clear that the Americans were serious about bombing Fordo. The Saudis and the Emirates put out press releases, decrying that the Israelis were bombing Iran. Those press releases were essentially messages to Iran. When you respond to the American attack, don't hit our territory. It was asking Iran just to avoid them in its response. There was silence. Everybody was waiting. Everybody was watching.

everybody was letting the Israelis do their thing. And the only thing worse than that silence were the declarations of the Houthis that they would join and they would fight and they would take the war to Washington, which wasn't followed up with any action whatsoever, not even against Israel. And finally, Hezbollah,

Iran eventually, in desperation, publicly asked Hezbollah to go to war. And Hezbollah publicly said no. How many billions, how many tens of billions? Did he reach 100, billion, has Iran spent on Chisbalah. And for that moment, for nothing else, but to be that debilitating northern front that rained hellfire on Israel in a war with Iran. And Chzbollah publicly said, you got this. We can't join you. The strategic standing of the

regime within Iran. What happened to this regime within Iran? The simple story is, we don't know. a lot about the inner discourse of Iranian society on this question, and I am more confused, the more I learn. Internet was down throughout the war. It tells you a lot about the regime that internet has to be down. Iranian state television, meanwhile, was proclaiming massive successes, there's a victory parade plan, and all of, as I said, Tel Aviv is destroyed, and everybody, the Israelis are leaving, and there's never been a greater victory in the history of war. Do Iranians believe it? Are Iranians rallying around the regime, because they perceive their national pride being wounded.

Maybe they don't like the regime. We know most Iranians don't like the regime from every single poll, even state polls. Even state media polls show that they don't put it down to, not like in their regime. They put it down to concern over economic situation or lack of faith in reform, things like that. But Iranians don't like the regime. But maybe they rally around it because Iran is being struck and its pride is wounded. Is it the opposite? or most Iranians horrified that the war stopped before the regime fell?

How many Iranians backed one narrative and how many back the other? And are there a third and fourth and fifth narrative in Iranian society right now? And the simple answer is it's too soon to tell, and we might never fully understand or no. I don't know of serious research that is being conducted right now to tell us, but if it happens, I will be sure to bring it here. In the end, this is not the downfall of the regime. That wasn't an Israeli goal. Israel is a tiny country with a population of Austria.

We've talked about this already. It did not think it was capable of regime change 1,500 kilometers away in a country nine times its size in population and 60 times its size in geographically. But it did reveal the chink in the armor. It revealed that the regime can't deliver the great religious redemption story, the narrative of dignity that it was selling for so many years

and then justified among its supporters all of its brutalities and injustices. the regime's own story of itself. This is also something we mentioned. It isn't the end of the regime, but I think it's not too much to hope that it is the beginning of the end, at least of its pretense that it deserves to rule

by virtue of those great religious promises and the promises of great victory and ascendant Shia power in the region. Nobody can take those promises seriously anymore. And so the regime now has to explain itself in a way it didn't before, or didn't feel it had to before. is that the beginning

is that the beginning of a 10-year arc of the building up of opposition that maybe forces so much reform that the regime is a different regime in 10 years without a great revolution I don't know but I'm going to be watching very closely because a lot will depend on that long arc

incidentally not unrelated we already see reports a few hours after the ceasefire was declared of mass arrests already being undertaken by the besieged by the police released by the Interior Ministry by the IRGC in the streets of many Iranian cities. Folks, Iran absorbed all of that, all of that damage, all of that degradation.

It's not going to rebuild any time soon. It's been cut down to size by an enemy with one-ninth of population. It's a pathetic end to a two-generation conflict that it itself declared. it itself started against a far-away tiny enemy that it gloried in, that it said was a reason for its own validation, and that it ultimately spent itself on achieving nothing. We were woken up early this morning by sirens once again, but we knew when we were woken up by those sirens that Iran knows it was beaten. that the missiles that were coming in were the petty face-saving

of a humiliated tyrant. We knew that the regime had lost its expensive, vast proxy armies. We knew that nearly all of its nuclear program was shattered. We knew that its credibility and capacity to instill fear were so far a thing of the past, with the exception of among Iran's own people. It will take them years to rebuild.

It may take decades. The only way to do it faster than that would be to negotiate an end to sanctions. And the only way to get an end to sanctions means an end to enrichment, at least as long as President Trump is in office. I hope, I believe, that's what they're saying in the United States. No one, ironically, is in a hurry to give Iran an end to sanctions for very prosaic reasons. Iranian oil isn't on the market, except selling undermarket prices to China.

And America is now a major energy exporter, and there are sanctions on Iran and sanctions on Russia that allow America to dominate the market. Well, why would America want Iranian oil back on the market? It's going to let Iran's regime huff and puff for a few years. Iran, similarly, for the same kind of prosaic geopolitics, tried to launch its longstanding plan that it had publicly threatened to do a thousand times to block the Straits of Hormuz, or 20% of the world's oil passes in the Persian Gulf, as a punishment for the American bombing. but then China told them not to. Because China can't afford right now economically a massive spike in global oil prices. The Ayatollah's regime is a shadow of its former self.

It's limping away from an unbroken chain of humiliating defeats. And my children slept tonight in a bomb shelter last night. They're not going to sleep tonight in that bomb shelter. But even when they were in that bomb shelter, those sirens this morning, they didn't wake them. They woke me, but they didn't wake the kids. They're used to it. They know they're in the bomb shelter. They know we protect them.

And now the regime's only victims, as always, are the people of Iran. We can't help them. But maybe that's beginning to end. Maybe short of its excuses, that too is something that's going to change. Finally, it's now time to win and rebuild in Gaza. What we do there now will determine a lot of... of how much of this success we can pocket for the future. We've reached a point in Gaza where over the last 12 days of war in Iran

when nobody was paying attention, Hamas has continued the hunting, the torturing, the murdering in broad daylight, and the filming, and then itself spreading the videos of ordinary Palestinians it accuses of collaborating with the Israeli aid effort through the Gaza humanitarian foundation, this American organization that the Israelis are heavily invested in, to push aid into Gaza without Hamas. Hamas is desperate for this aid effort to fail.

And the Israelis, in my view, are nowhere near as invested in this aid effort succeeding. There has to be now it's doing a lot. It's doing a lot against a Hamas that has massacred its own workers. It's doing a lot with the army terribly afraid of letting soldiers distribute aid because the population is still very much penetrated by Hamas and they would kill those soldiers that they encounter. A lot of friction between soldiers and civilians in Gaza would lose many soldiers' lives.

But here's the thing. Building out an aid system that bypasses Hamas is now the path to victory. It's how we get there. It's how Hamas is finally crushed. It's lost its last backer willing to fight. able to fight. It still has Qatar spending money, but it's lost its fundamental capacity to say others will endanger Israel for us. Let's take away from them also the aid by rushing massive amounts

of aid. There needs to be a refocus on that. And that needs to be the platform for getting our people out. Bringing that war to a close by pushing that aid, by getting out of Hamas, and understanding that their options are growing fewer and fewer. By giving them their survival outside of Gaza, if not in it. By ending the war in exchange for the hostages, and having a new dawn for Gaza and a new rebuilding for Gaza, that needs to be the priority now. Do I know how to do that?

Does that mean I know how to de-radicalize Gazans? Does that mean that the feelings that Gazans want to kill us all are going to go away from Israeli society? or their conviction that we're coming for them and this is all or nothing, the kind of war that Hamas has spent its entire existence trying to create, I have no idea how to solve all those problems. But our attention now has to turn to Gaza. It is now safer for us to take risks in Gaza than it ever was before,

and we can't screw this one up. We can't screw the aid up. We can't take aid away from where Hamas can reach it, and have the result be Gaza's starving. so it's time to win in Gaza, to rebuild in Gaza. I know that sounds cheap. That's the task. Let's refocus there. Let's get it done. Thank you for joining me.

Maybe one of the most interesting things that we've seen the last 12 days are the nature of our strengths. I've been arguing for 20 months that Israel is unbelievably strong. And again, I've been accused of being an optimist, making people feel good. but that was analytical. I thought our Air Force could do about a quarter of what it actually ended up being able to do. And I was considered way out ahead optimistic. I was not optimistic.

I know what they can do. And what the Mossad was capable of, we've seen it. As I said in the last episode, all of this was telegraphed ahead of time. Every capability the Air Force and the Mossad showed in Iran, it had already showed in Lebanon. It had already showed in Yemen. Iran should have noticed. I noticed. But all these strengths have to be cultivated.

Education, solidarity, democracy, good economic policy, smart, strategic and military force planning. We need to invest in that. Our policies don't always invest in that. A lot of government systems, a lot of political campaigns, they don't focus on solidarity. We can afford to fall apart as a people into angry, grudge-filled camps across the battlements of a culture war, much, much less than the Americans can afford it or than the British can afford it. We need to understand those strengths and we need to double down on them. Some happy little pablum to end 12 days of war. Israel did it. It's not the end of anything. It's the beginning

of a new version of it. But fundamentally, Israel accomplished what it needed to accomplish. Thank you for joining me.