Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/4/26: Trump Panics After Israel Blamed For Iran War, US Pushes Iran Civil War, Spain Rebukes Trump, Gas Prices Soar

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

Ryan and Emily discuss US Dubai consulate struck, US pushes Iran civil war, Spain rebukes Iran war, gas prices soar.   Murtaza Hussain: https://x.com/MazMHussain?s=20 Dave Weigel: https://x.com/daveweigel David Sirota: https://x.com/davidsirota      To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. I'm Clayton Eckerd. In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. But here's the thing. Bachelor fans hated him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. That's when his life took a disturbing turn.

A one-night stand would end in a courtroom. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. Listen to Love Trapped on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the on-purpose podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. No matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children. dread the conversation with my son. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Chetty on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story?

The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed. What if the truth was disguised by a story we changed? chose to believe. Oh my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to doubt the case of Lucy Lettby on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Saga and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member to

and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. Good morning, and welcome to Breaking Points, and welcome to all of our apparently new viewers who are looking for somewhere to get actually reasonable and honest reporting about this war. An escape from the propaganda. We welcome to. And so we have set up a one-month free for people. They are, if you haven't yet become kind of premium subscribers, so the promo code is BP free 26. Go to breakingpoints.com and then type in BP free 26. You get a month free. What that does,

it gets you the show emailed out to you a little before it goes out to the public. And in full. It's the whole show. Right. In full and without the ads. Everything else is going to be available. We don't keep anything behind a paywall, but it comes up later and then you have to skip the ads. Well, we keep Friday shows. The second half of the Friday show is behind a panel. And what's actually most important about that is it's supporting independent journalism. Yeah, right. And it supports our ability to do this because during a lot of the Epstein coverage, a lot of that stuff was demonetized. A lot of this is going to be demonetized, which means YouTube and the other platforms don't run ads up against it, and then we don't get revenue out of it. But we don't care because we have an enormous number of premium subscribers who keep it going. And so the benefit is nice. It's better to get the whole show and not have the ads. But really what you're doing is signaling support for journalism that is just going to be honest and tell you what's going on. This morning I woke up and opened up the New York Times app and the first thing was like it said, like, you're a sick man, Randolph.

It said U.S. and Israel attack Iranian military installations. Like, okay, well, that is true. It's not the whole truth. And we're going to talk about later in the program, what is being done to one of the oldest. and most populated cities on the planet. An indiscriminate carpet bombing. We have a lot of video that you're going to want to stick around for. A video from Dubai that we're going to get to in just a moment as well all around the Middle East. And Donald Trump was speaking again in the Oval Office yesterday, answering questions from the press that are a little bit all over the place. That's probably not a surprise to anybody,

but we will be synthesizing those with what other people in the administration have said, what people said walking out of a briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday, what members said walking out of a briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday, Ryan. And your colleague's Jeremy Schaahill and Mertaza Hussein are going to be with us. Jeremy flaked on us. It's going to be Mazzo. Jeremy, we got to, but now we got to call him out. Yes, that's right. No, he's actually interviewing a top Iranian official at the moment. And the journalism always takes precedence over the punditry. So we're not actually angry with him. So that's fine. Yeah, but Mas will be great. My colleague, Mertaza, over a drop site. A couple years ago, he said,

said, you know, he spent his whole life learning about geopolitics, international law, human rights, thinking that that was the thing that he needed to understand to be a foreign policy reporter. Several years ago, he was like, that's not it, actually. It's weapon systems. And it's kind of military doctrine because it is force that is going to be reshaping the world in the decades ahead. And the last several years have absolutely borne out his own. own professional assessment. And so he can talk to us about how things are actually going, as far as we can tell in this regional conflict. And then we're also going to break down the conflict

from the two separate, I don't want to say vantage points, but two separate categories or sub-conflicts that are roiling right now, Europe and gas prices. So we have two different blocks where we're going to dig deep into both of those aspects of this. We also, of course, are excited to have election coverage because it is a Wednesday after a major primary. around the country, particularly in Texas, where... I'm spoiling this, but Dan Crenshaw lost his primary. Or Dan Crenshaw. Hardly knew you.

Yeah, we hardly knew you. But anyway, there's a lot to break down on that. And Dave Weigel and David Serota are both going to be joining us a little double-dave action. Last week, we had two Dave's, Dave Dan and Dave Hogg. Our new policies, we are only interviewing Dave's. Apparently. That's just it. That's only Dave.

I don't know when that happened or whose idea it was, but we're okay. Maas slept through somehow. This is why Jeremy dropped out, actually. Nothing to do with anything else. All right, everyone. Well, stick around for that. And BP Free 26 is the promo code for free access to premium breaking points and to a premium breaking points subscription.

Let's turn now to video coming out of Dubai, Ryan, because this is, we can put A2 up on the screen. This is the U.S. consulate in Dubai getting hit. If you need an example of how serious, I mean, you don't need an example, but if you want to have a visual of how serious this conflict continues to be, that is the U.S. consulate in Dubai going up in smoke. Surreal image, Ryan. Yes, and this comes after, it appears that the CIA station was hit in Saudi Arabia. The Defense Department officials, War Department, I guess they call them now. Much more accurate, by the way. in Bahrain and Jeremy had actually reported that the Iranians were telling him that they had tracked

American officials and troops to these particular hotels and then struck these particular floors of particular hotels. And a lot of people dismissed that reporting like, come on, you're joking. They didn't actually do that. And then it emerges, oh, yes, actually, it does appear that they did that. Which, just to make one side point, we spent two years being told that Hamas uses human shields and is deplorable for that. As soon as conflict breaks out in this region, the U.S. sends enormous numbers of its people literally into civilian hotels.

And this was in Saudi Arabia. That was in Bahrain. Bahrain, but they've been hit. The CIA station in Saudi Arabia. And they hit the CIA station in Saudi Arabia, the American consulate. in Dubai. This, and we'll talk more about this with Mons, the Gulf region is not set up to withstand economically

this type of violence. It is based on an expat. It's based on oil, gas, and an expat community. And this is not what they signed up for, any of them. Even though the Saudis were pushing the Iran strikes. And we can talk about that too with Mons. That was a Washington Post report that everybody is dismissing as not credible. So the Post reported that MBS multiple times pressed Trump to attack Iran, even though publicly he was saying don't do it.

Some reporting that I've done on this, it seems like what happened is that Lindsay Graham went to Saudi Arabia at the end of last month. met with MBS and publicly said, like he made the cell to MBS. I think that what happened then is Graham came back and told Trump, the Crown Prince wants you to do it. But the Crown Prince never told Graham that. Graham just told Trump that. And then Trump told other people that who then told the Washington Post that. That wouldn't be surprising.

Saudi Arabia is saying we absolutely did not say this. That wouldn't be surprising at all if that's what happened. No, because this could wind up with their oil fields on fire. Lindsay Graham playing telephone with everyone. He's been all over the press. And a very malevolent, deliberate game of telephone. Incredible. Let's actually listen to Trump himself,

who was pushed yesterday in the Oval Office about comments that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, not just Marco Rubio, though, Mike Johnson also had made on Capitol Hill the day before talking about how the immediate, and Sogern-Kristow covered this yesterday, the immediate precipitating factors that we knew we got intelligence that Israel was going to strike. So we had to join preemptive action. Otherwise, we would have been behind the eight ball.

And he would have, Rubio said, you guys would have been doing hearings about why we didn't join with Israel in this attack. Now, Rubio said we had to do it anyway. And Johnson has said stuff to that effect as well. But they did say the immediate precipitating factor. It almost sounded like cope. It almost sounded like they were trying to scapegoat Israel for forcing their hand while also trying to own the attacks. So here's how Donald Trump responded to comments, A3. If Israel forced your hand to launch these strikes against Iran? No. No.

No, I might have forced their hands. You see, we were having negotiations with these lunatics. And it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. They were going to attack if we didn't do it. Based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were going to attack first. And I didn't want that to happen. So if anything, I might have forced Israel's hand. But Israel was ready and we were ready. And we've had a very, very powerful impact. What's the worst case scenario that you have planned for in Iran? Well, I don't know if there's a worst case. We have them very much beaten militarily from the military standpoint. They're still lobbying some missiles.

at some point they wouldn't be able to do that. I guess the worst case would be we do this, and then somebody takes over who's as bad as the previous person, right? That could happen. We don't want that to happen. It would probably be the worst you go through this. And then in five years you realize you put somebody in who was no better. Just very casually. It could get worse.

Could get worse. The government could be worse. Yeah, so a lot of Democrats emerged from a classified briefing yesterday on the Hill, and all of them said, I went. in, you know, concerned about this, I came out frightened. They have no plan. They can't even in a classified setting keep their own stories consistent from the beginning to the end. And if you see Trump talking there, he clearly does not have, he has not spent much time thinking this through. The messaging through. Right. The idea, not forget the messaging. Like, why, like, what happened?

Like, why he attacked and what the, and what the goal of the attack is going to be. He said, we're negotiating with these lunatics. No, Iran was negotiating with. lunatics. Okay. Trump was negotiating with Iran. The Omani foreign minister... I think he was also negotiating with lunatics.

Well, maybe they're all lunatics. The Omani foreign minister, lunatics who turned out to be correct, sometimes you can be paranoid and correct. Yeah, that is, yes, that's... Many such cases. Yeah, the Omani foreign minister went on air and said,

and he said, here's what they're offering. No enrichment, no stockpiling. open to talking about ballistic missiles, but you want to promise first that you're not going to attack. He, because he sensed that Kushner and Butkov just either didn't understand or weren't being serious about receiving the offer, he went on TV and like told the entire world public what was what was on offer for Trump to say, oh, they were actually about to attack. It just doesn't pass the smith test, the sniff test. No, it's not what anybody, and it's also not what anybody's saying. It's not what the intelligence is saying.

Like, it is, Marco Rubio wasn't saying. He's alone making that case. No, Marco Rubio was saying they would have gotten past the point of immunity very soon, meaning if it would have been much harder to take out, this is a, Rubio's argument, would have been much harder to take out the military capacity, degraded. Exactly. And so that's not even... How does this even do anything about that?

Well, yeah, and on what timetable, right? So is this going to, are you able to, to degrade their military to the point where, I mean, when we were talking about their nuclear capacity being obliterated in June, that was a 10-year timetable, allegedly, they'd been set back a decade. They can rebuild missiles quickly. You can't get rid of their ability to make missiles. They know how to do it. They have the knowledge. And get the drones from China. They're pretty cheap. So are we going to be right back here in a year, in five years, because fundamentally, it is an ideology. There is a, I mean, since the IRGC in the last 10-plus years has particularly been emphasizing this idea that

there's an eschatological element to Israel's existence. That if you get rid of Israel, you can bring in the, like, there are, of course, some far-right Israelis who think that. There are some dispensationalist Christian evangelicals who think that, too. But that is also something you can't eradicate with bombs in Iran. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.

I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan.

he became the first bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract.

Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search warrant. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of He Said She Said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. Listen to Love Trapped on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast.

I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today. Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health, and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight. I hate fame, I hate the word celebrity, I hate those words, that you make me uncomfortable. But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence,

it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Beau was born. My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my job. I dread the conversation with my son. What do you think you'd say?

Listen to On Purpose with Jay Chetty on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Rubio's claim that the reason that the U.S. attacked now is because Israel was going to attack, and we were going to attack. going to be attacked as a result of that. So we had to attack. Like, that was the claim that he made. It's one of the most consequential public emissions made in decades. I would imagine that the Israelis are absolutely livid, that he said that publicly. And so Rubio is now doing a tiny bit of cleanup around that. So let's see how he's kind of finessing this with A4. Yesterday, that's why we needed to get involved. Today, the president said that Iran was going to get. Yeah, your statement is false. So that's what?

I was asked very specific. Were you there yesterday? Yes, I asked the question. Okay. Did you go in because of Israel? And I said, you were asked me, are you from the follow-up? And I said, no. I told you this had to happen anyway. The president made a decision. And the decision he made was that Iran was not going to be allowed to hide behind its ballistic missile program, that Iran was not going to be allowed to hide behind its ability to conduct these attacks. That decision had been made. The president systematically made a decision to systematically destroy this terroristic capability that they had, and we carried that out.

I was very clear on that answer. This was a question of timing of why this had to happen as a joint operation, not the question of the intent. Once the president made a decision that negotiations were not going to work, that they were playing us on the negotiations, and that this was a threat that was untenable, the decision was made to strike them. That's what I said yesterday, and you guys need to play it. If you're going to play these statements, you need to play the whole statement, not clip it to reach a narrative that you want to do, all right? Is there a plan in place to evacuate Americans before the attack? Well, that's the plan we're trying to carry out.

The problem is, or the challenge we are facing is airspace closures. If a country closes their airport, for example, in some cases, the airports have been hit. So the airport in Kuwait was hit. So if an airport's been attacked or the airspace is closed, then we can have the planes lined up to go, but we can't get them to land because we don't have the permissions to land there. So that's the challenge. It's going to take a little time because we don't control the airspace closures. That said, there may be more people.

people out there that need help. We need to know who you are. So please, I'm asking the media, publicize the phone numbers and the website, because we need people to call in so we have their name, we have their contact information, we have their location, and their request. The context there is that there are thousands of Americans who, you know, want to be evacuated from this war zone. If you put the two pieces together, Rubio is effectively saying that because of the timing of when this happened, which was driven by Israel, that he can't get he can't get these Americans evacuated at this point. So Senator Tom Cotton was also trying to clean this up a little bit, but just ended up reiterating the point. Let's do a five.

Israel faced an existential risk, and they were prepared to strike Iran alone. If that happened, Iran was very likely to target our troops. That may address the question of why now, Why not two weeks ago? Why not two months from now? The president, though, did not want to put our troops in harm's way. The more fundamental question, though, is why? Why did we have to carry out this operation against Iran? And as I said, that's because they have a vast missile arsenal that far exceeds our combined missile defenses, and it gets worse every single month. That is an unacceptable threat to the United States. So, Emily, so we were going to do it anyway at some point in the next maybe few months, even though we were pretending to do these negotiations. But Israel just decided to do it. So we went with them. And Trump also maybe forced their hand.

Trump forced their hand. Yes. So Israel, you know, the peacemaker in the Middle East absolutely did not want to attack Iran for sure, even though Netanyahu put out this like gloating video saying like, I have been yearning for this. for this attack on Iran for 40 years now. 40 years ago, by the way, as you know, Israel and the United States were arming Iran. Oh, yeah. So the yearn to attack Iran was happening at the same time that we were literally sending weapons to Iran.

So setting all that aside, should we move to the classified briefing or do you have any thoughts on how this incredibly historic admission on the part of Rubio and and Johnson and others, is going to factor in politically, especially if and as this becomes a complete economic catastrophe and also American lives and thousands of other people's lives get lost as a result of it. I mean, I think that's a great place to go next, because this is what Democratic senators were saying after emerging from the briefings that Mark Arribio was on Capitol Hill to do. And I think you're totally right also to pick up that the emergent narrative seems to be, we were going to do it anyway, we had to do it now.

Like, that's what they clearly don't want to say that because it's been, they've seen how it's played. That's why you saw Rubio rolling out there frustrated yesterday saying, play the whole clip, play the whole clip. And I said, well, you said that. You literally said that the precipitating factor was because our intelligence said Israel was going to do something. We knew Israel was going to do the strike.

So, yes, play the whole clip. Great. Happy to have this broader picture understanding. It was the whole clip. But you're also, even when you're doing the broader picture understanding, reiterating exactly what everybody actually took issue with, which was that Israel forced our hand. And the president of the United States is saying something different.

We have kids from Minnesota coming back in boxes. That's a disaster. That's a disaster. It is a moral disaster. It's a disaster for the administration. The messaging has been atrocious. And I think it's because it reflects. The strategy is muddled to begin with.

You could hear that in Trump's comments. the point that you made Ryan where he's like, well, I don't know what comes next. Maybe it'll be worse. I hope it's not worse. Maybe it'll be worse. Could be worse. So what? Hey. Here's Dick Blumenthal, Senator from Connecticut walking out of the briefing yesterday. Ryan, would it be fair to characterize him as somebody who's, let's say, hawkish on Israel, supportive of Israel? Yep. Yes. Here we go. Let's roll it. I just want to say, I am more fearful than ever after this briefing that we may be putting boots on the ground. and that troops from the United States may be necessary to accomplish objectives that the administration

seems to have. But I also am no more clear on what the priorities are going to be of the administration going forward, whether it is destroying the nuclear capacity of Iran or simply the missiles or regime change or stopping terrorist activities. And I think the administration owes it to the American people to have briefings not just for members of Congress, but for the American public. Nothing here should have been classified. It should be available to the American people. Let's roll another hawk. Chuck Schumer walking out of the meeting. This is A7. Do you think Israel, you know, forced the U.S.'s hand here, boxed the U.S. in on this?

No one wants a nuclear war. No one wants a nuclear Israel, but we certainly don't want an endless war, plain and simple. What did I say? Oh, no. Got it. Let me say that again. No one wants an endless war, but we certainly don't want a nuclear Iran. That's for sure.

Okay? Listening audience, what you missed was Chuck Schumer started to walk away after he said nobody wants a nuclear Israel. reporters were like, wait, wait, wait. So it goes back to the camera, says, let me do another take. Let me say that again and corrects himself to say nuclear Iran. And Israel, for context, has nuclear weapons but pretends that they don't. And it's this bizarre, decades-long situation where journalists and policymakers are supposed to sort of pretend like they don't know that they do,

even though they absolutely do and have tested them and worked with the apartheid South Africa on helping them develop one. It's like, I wouldn't say nobody wants a nuclear Israel. Israel does, but other than that, yeah. Well, so these are two, I think if people are listening, they've identified two different layers of muddled messaging. That's a way too charitable term. Of mixed messaging, of contradictory messaging, which is, is it nukes or missiles?

And was it Israel or was it our decision? Right. And at that moment, did we do it at that moment on our own, or because we knew Israel was going to strike? and there's been contradictory and mixed message on both of those layers, and those are predicate, level questions, foundational questions about this new war. Is it even a war?

The president said war in his speech. So, of course, yes, it's a war. But then you have Mark Wayne Mullen. For example, also, he was standing right where Chuck Schumer was standing in the video. We just played, say, this is a war. Reporter said, you know, you just said that it's a war. And he did a Schumer and said, I need to correct myself. I misspoke. That was a misspoke. What is it? It's a combat operation.

They're saying major combat operation. Defensive combat operation. Preemptive, yes. Proactive. And Schumer can't get out of his own way and become a real opposition figure because of his hostility to Iran rooted in his like, you know, decades long support for Israel. If you notice in that clip, he leads with nobody wants a nuclear Iran rather than what is kind of more oppressing at the moment the massive war that might spiral into World War III. It punts. And also, I thought this was obliterated last June. And also, they were at the table offering to have no stockpiling. So today, there will be a war powers resolution vote in the Senate. It looks like John Federman will join Republicans.

Graham Platner has been pushing Susan Collins very hard on this, pushing her to condemn this, to turn her concerns into actions and join Democrats in opposing this, you might know better than me. I don't think she's going to do that. We'll see how she ends up voting. If I were her, I would just throw out, her vote is not going to be decisive. I think it's going to lose. You've got 53 Republicans plus Federman, right? So they can lose a couple of Republicans and still defeat the war powers resolution. So if I'm Susan Collins, I would just take a cynical vote and vote for the war powers resolution. I don't think she really will, though. What do you think? Well, it'll, yeah, I mean, it depends on whatever agreement is happening

behind closed doors with Trump world, National Republican Senatorial Committee world. And whatever they think is smarter for her. Well, and also if Donald Trump is going to be sensitive about people voting against him, or if they can. Oh, then if he starts attacking her and you lose money. Lose money and lose hardcore MAGA votes, who then, yeah. Otherwise, if you telegraph, you're taking a cynical vote. Yeah, so she'll go with a war. Or if you telegraph taking a cynical process vote, maybe you can alleviate that and you

can work on that, again, behind closed doors. But one of the big takeaways from what you just said, actually, is that Platner's already moved on to Susan Collins, which I think is hilarious. It's like Janet Mills is yesterday's name is. Primary is over moving on to Susan Collins, but he really is. If people don't live on Twitter, there was. was like two or three day hissy fit where a whole bunch of like establishment Democrats all in unison doing telling grand platter to drop out. It was like the funniest thing. It's like, I'm sorry,

what? Yeah. Are you looking for the manager? Like it's a primary that you're going to vote. Yeah. It was so undignified and so embarrassing. And then it just like faded. Well, let's finish here with this clip of Lindsay Graham. Get a little bit from the right. We're going to splice up here, Lindsey Graham and Tim Burchett, so Republican member of the House, Freedom Caucus guy. You've probably seen Burchett around. But here's Graham and then Burchett. It's worth watching these both back to back.

So I'm calling on President Trump today. Join Israel to attack Hezbollah. Avenge the Marines. America never forgets. Those 220 Marines and 18 sailors families, we want to go after the infrastructure that killed your loved ones. their IRGC assets in Beirut as I speak. President Trump come up with a new operation called Semperfy, fly with Israel, and go after Hezbollah,

who has American blood on its hands, not only take the mothership of Iran down, also take the proxy of Hezbollah, settle the score, even the account. Lindsey hadn't seen a fist fight. He hasn't wanted to turn into a bombing right, so I just take it with a grain of salt. As a Republican, if you didn't gauge from the accent. Yeah.

Well, he also said to a reporter in that same press conference, we do expect the public to hold us accountable as the war goes on, and you should hold us accountable. He's a Freedom Caucus guy, so he's not like your average establishment person and obviously feels heat from corners of the base that are uncomfortable with this. Now, what I can tell so far,

vibes on the right very supportive. There are a couple of skeptical high-profile voices, but I think Republican voters are very supportive of what's happened. So I think maybe there's probably more skepticism and criticism on the online right than there is the offline or the partially online, right? So I don't know how much people are going to be feeling. But if it goes on longer, you know, Birchett's going to hear from people who feel like Marjorie Taylor Green in his own district.

Probably already is hearing from a decent chunk of people. I mean, even it's 20, 30 percent of the Republican base. That's a lot. And it'll grow as this continues. And just to be clear there, Lindsay Graham was saying that the U.S. should bomb Lebanon to avenge a 1983 bombing, which took place before, I would assume, most people in Hezbollah were born, including my esteemed co-hosts, right? That's right. Yes, it's a decade. Me and those Hezbollah guys, 90s kids. Nineties kids. All right, up next, drop sites, Bertazzi was saying, is going to walk us through. Some more of this, including U.S. signaling that they're going to be.

going to try to start a civil war in Iran by arming Kurdish proxies. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.

So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on I Heart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first Bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines.

It began as a one-night stand. and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search warrant. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of He Said She Said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. Esler! Listen to Love Trapped on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose Podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today. Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health, and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight.

I hate fame. I hate the word celebrity. I hate those words. So you made me uncomfortable. But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there.

I'm in Australia when Beau is born. My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my job. I dread the conversation with my son. What do you think you'd say? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Chetty on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Trump administration is signaling that it plans to arm Kurdish proxies to start an uprising in Iran, which is actually kind of an unusual thing to telegraph publicly if you're going to try to keep it clandestine. So we're going to talk about where that comes from and what that means in a moment with my dropside colleague, Mertaza Hussein.

But first, we have a one-month free premium offer that we're doling out to everybody so that you can get coverage of this war without having to pay for it. It's go to breakingpoints.com. It's BP326. And we would be in post. We can add a little map here because I think it's important here. When Sykes-Picot drew the lines of the Middle East, they took the Kurdish region, the Kurdish population, and split it basically right down the middle.

They put a quarter of it over in Turkey. So there's a large Kurdish population in eastern Turkey. There's then a large Kurdish population in northeast Syria. Then there's a large Kurdish population over in northern Iraq. And then you have a smaller but non-trivial Kurdish population in Iran. And so it is the Iranian Kurds that are now the focus of the U.S. attention and affection and weapons supplies hoping to further destabilize Iran. So, Amaz, thank you so much for joining us this morning. Very much appreciate it. And we can

put up, what do we have, B2 here. This is from CNN. This is the U.S. intelligence officials signaling that they plan to spark an uprising in Iran, which obviously has, some level of sciop, psychological operation to it, because the CIA is also capable of sparking uprisings without telling CNN that they're about to spark an uprising. And if we had the map still up there, we could point out that down in the southern part of Iran is there's a large beloc population. There's a beloc population in neighboring Pakistan, which has all sorts of kind of intelligence connections and also their own kind of drive for for independence or our autonomy. So there's a lot of concern that the southern area as well could become a place

for some sort of uprising. So what do we know so far about the kind of Trump outreach to the Iraqi Kurds and whether or not the Kurds see this as in their interest? Yeah, so right as you pointed out, the Kurds have been a stateless population. population or a state, probably without their own states, for their ethnicity, at least, since Sykes-Picot. They're spread out among a few different countries, countries of which they're citizens, but they don't have a Kurdistan of their own, per se. And so, you know, there's always been this tension with these states and so forth about how Kurds will fit in. And now I think this report, you know, there's been militancy and

there's been political movements in Iranian and Kurdistan for a long time. But I think that this report is very fascinating because, as you said, it's first. strange to telegraph so loudly that you're about to do this imminently. I think one of the some of the reports said an offensive could start in a few days. That's a very strange thing to identify that way. But that said, there have been reports that the U.S. has made intelligence contacts with the PJ.A.K., which is like the Iranian branch of the PKK, effectively in Iran, also reports of weapons transfers and so forth. So I don't find it completely beyond the pale, or I don't find it completely outlanders that they could be doing this. So I think,

But I think it's very clear that if they were to do this, it would not be to really help the Kurds per se. It would be kind of an inversion of the Iraq war situation where the U.S. basically accidentally started a civil war by creating a security dilemma. In this case, it seems like they're deliberately trying to start a civil war and maybe try to drain the attention and resources already stretched of the Iranian military. They may impose a no-fly zone over this part of Iran to try to break the territorial integrity of Iran in that sense. And I think those are all things that are very plausible. The one thing is if you talk to Iranians, they're very divided and polarized about many different things in a truant way. One thing that really unites them is the territorial integrity of Iran.

They're very patriotic across political division. So I think that one byproduct of this, it may actually make people rally around the country and the flag or even the government because it's the nightmare scenario of pretty much every Iranian. And even the most Shah Palavu is supporting Iranian is milted about the subject. They don't accept it. So, you know, it's not to say it won't happen and they're not going to try it. But, you know, I'll say one more thing. It would also require much more U.S. involvement.

It's not just like passing it off to the Kurds and walking away. Probably need tremendous U.S. special forces presence in Iran, ongoing, as I said, air cover for these troops, these Kurdish forces to protect them and so forth. And I do think we're heading down the road if we're doing this of much greater U.S. involvement, including ground involvement in Iran. Yeah, on that point, actually, Ryan highlighted this clip. of a Kurdish Imam that we can put it up on the screen that said to Paula V, quote, let me make this clear.

When your dictator father executed Qazi Muhammad, there was only one Qazi Muhammad, but now millions of Qazi exist in Kurdistan. We promise we will not allow you to enter any part of Kurdistan in Iran. Maz, what do you make of that? What does that tell us? What more does that tell us about the dynamics you were just laying out? Well, one thing to keep in mind is that Iran is an ethnically heterogeneous country. I think maybe like half or 60% of people are a Persian background,

but there's a huge population of people with Turkish background, Kurds, Baloch and so forth, even smaller ethnicities throughout the country as well. And Rassal-Palavi really speaks to the Persian segment of the population, the more urban, you know, plurality or a slim majority of the country. But there's a very big country, it's a country with 90 million people. And these people, many of them, did not have a very happy experience with the previous Shah

and they view the imposition of another Pala B as a return to like a straightforward Persian ethnic chauvinism in their view so that they would not view that as a liberation at all for the vast majority of them. The current government is very polarizing and probably

has a support of a segment of the population and not the majority but in theory it's sort of intended to represent the entire country. It's not an ethnic party per se it's a national party national government. So I think that introducing,

I don't think that even really people are thinking about these dynamics and thinking about setting the shot back. It's a very romantic idea. It's male to king back to the country. Monarchic registrations have history in Europe in the past as well too. But it's a very, very complex situation. And as many U.S. officials have said,

and many foreign officials have said, spoken with the U.S. counterparts, it doesn't seem as a plan per se. And I believe that the impression that Reza Pahlaby is more of the Israelis guy than the Americans, because he's much more closely embraced by Netanyahu, then he has been by the U.S., which has kept him, at least in public at arms lands.

Yeah, and Trump yesterday was asked about Rezapolavi and pretty much dismissed him. In a similar way to the way that Maria Machado seemed to be kind of dismissed by Trump. He's like, yeah, he seems like a nice guy, but I don't know if like he's, I don't know if he's the one. There's some other people, you know, that he thinks could run Iran. And to your point, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. plan runs kind of in direct conflict and contradiction to this like, we're going to spark armed uprisings all over the place because, you know, the Shah, the crown prince, whatever he calls himself, has been very clear that, you know, it's one Iran, and he will be the king of all of

Iran, and then it will be a democratic transition at some point in the future. But he's not tolerating, you know, separatist movements. You know, his father, you know, executed people who kind of pursued that similar line. So those are, you know, those are two strategies, as you said, that are, they cannot work together. We were originally told by Trump that this was going to be a regime-change war. It seems like they're starting to realize that it's not quite as simple as they thought. And as many people have pointed out, just changing the regime, you know, through an aerial bombardment campaign, you know, isn't quite possible. So it seems now, This is what I wanted to ask you about.

And we can roll B1 here while I'm asking this question. It seems like a kind of split the baby, split the country strategy is, okay, we can't do regime change. This is Tehran. These are images coming out of just apocalyptic scenes coming out of Tehran. Okay, we can't do regime change, but maybe we can do complete regime destruction, complete regime collapse, and make it so. This country is just simply rendered a failed state, you know, dropped from the ranks of a struggling country under sanctions to one that more resembles Gaza. And that can be, and that can adopt the approach that the Israelis took to have taken to Gaza, which they call, you know, mowing the lawn, which would mean, you know, every six months or so, they come in with a bombing campaign.

as soon as a little bit of reconstruction gets going and life starts to get back, normally bomb them back to misery again. And so if you can have the bloke people are rising up, if you can have the Kurds rising up and a constant bombardment of this one of the oldest and most populated cities in the world, then maybe you can just destroy the regime. So what are you seeing just as a matter of strategy? Like what is being done to Tehran as we speak? Well, I think, Ryan, you hit the nail on the head. I think that they're not doing regime change per se. And if they were trying to hypothetically impose a neoliberal pro-Western government, maybe res la palavi to control all of Iran,

that would be one of the more relatively benign outcomes, actually, or benign intentions, because you're trying to preserve something called Iran, even in a very bloody and brutal way. I don't think that's what they're trying to do here. I think they're trying to do regime destruction, regime dissolution. They would like to turn Iran into something like Iraq in the 1990s, where it had been heavily damaged. It was a very poor and sanctioned.

Sovereignty was basically irrelevant. You could bomb it any time you wanted. Keep it on the back foot. And then, you know, one day, 10 years later, if the circumstances arose, you can go in there and knock it off. And people wouldn't really object to it at the time. The impression, I guess, in listening to Trump administration officials, is that they consider the entire, the major mistake of the war on terror,

was not the killing and destruction, but it was the attempt to try to engineer something out of that. You know, I think it seems like the war and terror was like very progressive and woke or something. It was too involved in human rights and state building and stuff like that. What they would like to do, and they're pretty much open about this. They like to destroy Iran in very extreme and vulgar terms. They just described that, including Secretary of Excess today. So they, and they don't plan to rebuild it,

or they don't plan to put someone new in charge if someone new comes in who maybe supports CW. if not, no problem. And causing the dissolution of the country is something which, you know, it's very harmful to countries around Iran. It's bad for Turkey or Pakistan or the Gulf Arab states and so forth. It could be very bad for Europe. There's a major refugee crisis, which I think Iran is a country of 90 million people. I think it would absolutely be a refugee crisis at that point.

But the U.S. is far away. Even Israel is pretty far away. So they could probably weather the blows from that. And, you know, that's kind of, I think, the plan such as it is, whether that will be successful or not, I don't know, because, you know, Iran is a very large, coherent, cohesive country. It wasn't really like Iraq or even Syria that was created by, you know, Sykes-Pico-colonial borders. It has, like, actual country with actual, like, historic, civilizational sort of containment that it had. So I don't think it's that easy to destroy it. But that said, you know, you can do tremendous harm.

You could kill tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people could be killed. It's not by any means off the out of the realm of possibility. And I do think we're heading to someone like that. So I think that that's unfortunately the trajectory. And, you know, the Iranian government could have options and how it responds and managed to maintain power and so forth. But they're in for a very, very challenging period. And I think we're only sadly at the beginning of this. Well, let's roll this footage from Lebanon.

This is B4 because actually, you know, we, Muz, we played a clip of Lindsey Graham at the Senate yesterday calling for Trump to join Israel, strike Hezbollah, you know, avenge the Marines. But everything you're just saying probably rings in many people's minds as what happened after Iraq, particularly what happened after Iraq with the rise of ISIS. And I guess that's my next question is where, you know, you were saying, if you have this dispersed or you have this power vacuum, what could come next is not what anybody predicted when we went into Iraq.

I mean, it's remarkable to look back on that and think of how little understanding there was of what could come next. But this seems utterly insane for the United States to be completely confident that what comes next is going to be potentially inevitably better than what was before, which is, again, sitting there saying over and over again,

it couldn't possibly get worse. It couldn't possibly get worse. What could get worse, if anything, Maas? Well, you could have, as I mentioned earlier, the refugee crisis. The refugee crisis was hugely disabilizing to Europe. I had a tremendous impact on politics all over the world. That's very impossible. You have Iraq and Syria, Syria, they're only, you know, the 20 million in the population and so forth.

Iran is 90 million people. That's a tremendous number of people. even a fraction of whom may become refugees who would wind up in Europe that would completely change the politics at the continent again and less than a decade. So I think that's a very important possible consequence. But also, you know, Iran,

there's a tremendous amount of knowledge and material, militarily, nuclear stuff in there as well too. You can have a breakdown of state authority. You could have different factions fighting over nuclear material, people trying to develop nuclear weapons outside of the cohesive state structure

such as they know one could see that. They can be cooperating with people outside the country. They can cooperate people in Russia or, you know, elsewhere in the world to do this, conceal these activities. You know, the way Iranis right now, especially with the government, trying to engage with the international community in various ways, there's a great duty of transparency that affords

because, you know, you know where Iranian nuclear sites are, you know, for the most part, where the nuclear materials are. What if that whole structure breaks down or a small group of people, armed people, in some organization, go to the mountains of a very mountainous country, and develop a nuclear weapon up there, dirty bomb or something like that. You know, a million nightmare scenarios could happen if you open, turn a gigantic country like that and do an apocalypse.

And you're not bombing the, well, I was just going to say, because you know this very well, you're not bombing the, what's the right word, the theological persuasions or the ideological persuasions of some chunk of the Iranian population away. In fact, you could actually be radicalizing more and more people into IRGC style ideologies. I mean, that's, again, it's part of what happened with ISIS. You hear how ISIS was recruiting people. Some of these videos that are coming, I mean, what happened to the school in the first, what, 24 hours of the bombing? That's a recipe for another potential ISIS like recruitment boon. It seems to me at least, but you would know this better, Ms. Well, I think it might be likely to

revivify like a very hardline Iranian nationalism, maybe channeled to the current government. That's a very significant possibility. Because the whole message to the government was that America is bad and America pushed us around in the past. It did a coup in the 1950s. Did arms Saddam Hussein in the 80s. And a lot of people actually didn't really believe that anymore,

younger people and so forth. And, you know, however long this goes on, it's not violence nationally has a polarizing effect. People start to, you know, get back. But as you said, they start to get noticing or they get hurt or their family members are in danger, change their perception. Then the government was not very popular before this. It was maybe 30%, 25%, something like that.

People's back of the envelope calculations at the level support society. If you continue bombing them, you'll generate patriotic sentiments that they can challenge. So maybe the U.S. isn't different to that. Maybe they're not trying to engineer any Iran so they don't care. But that would strengthen the Iranian government, absolutely. because the one thing that would make it very easy to resist or easier to resist this onslaught or attempts to break up the country on ethnic basis is to revivify support in the government. And the government would have to do things too.

They have to change the way engaging the people, maybe change some of its public messaging and the way it makes decisions be more inclusive in that sense to a degree. But, you know, it's giving them an opportunity for that. I don't see necessarily like a wholly extreme ISIS-like movement emerging from Iran. I think that there was kind of like a unique constellation of factors in Iraq and Syria that resulted in that. But I do think that it would transform people's opinions in ways which could be politically adverse in the long term. And last question for me. What is Iran doing differently this time that they're clearly getting absolutely pummeled by Israel and the United States?

The bombing campaign seems to be exceeding what was done during the 12-day war. but what is Iran doing differently when it comes to their response and what is working for them and what's not working? Well, it seems like this time they're relying more on these short range or shorter range of one-way attack drones, the Shahid drones that they're firing U.S. positions in the Gulf states. And sometimes the targets in the Gulf states as well, too. That's been the predominant focus of their retaliation. So, you know, what's interesting thing is that most of Iran's ballistic missile force is actually not developed to hit Israel. It's developed to hit these targets in the Gulf. Gulf. So, you know, they're using more of those. And obviously they're under much more fire

this time to suppress these launchers to destroy them before they can be fired and so forth. But still, as I said, it's a very big country. And around the Persian Gulf littoral area, they have caves, they have small launch sites and so forth. They're very difficult to get all of them. And they're doing regular stream of attacks on these targets. And there was actually a New York Times story about this on social media as well, too, but they were mapping out all. all the radars that the Iranians hit in the Gulf states, they've actually destroyed billions of dollars of U.S. equipment at these bases and very sophisticated anti-bullistic missile radars and other radars and so forth.

So they are actually hitting things which matter. They also hit the CIA station, Saudi Arabia. They hit tendencies and so forth. So this is not completely trivial response. But that said, given the depletion of stockpiles from the last war and also this time the fact that the U.S. is not just involved hitting Iran, we're also giving fuel support to the Israeli so they could hit Iran more regularly, is difficult to maintain the large-level ballistic missile salvos that took place in the last war. This means that the U.S. and

Israeli interceptors are probably depleting at a slower rate than before, but also, you know, they can't really hit these targets as hard as they did before. So I think from the Iranian perspective, they also maybe try to preserve their capacities, not to fire them all in the short term, but to fight a long war for Trition, because if the U.S. and Israel can only fight for a few weeks, this capacity, but they can go for months and months and six months or something like that and keep firing, then the perception of who is really on top here may start to shift. And I think that's usually the strategy of the weaker party in a war. Many Iranian officials have said this.

And I'll say one last thing. It was seen as the biggest mistake that the Iranians made last year when they stopped firing after 12 days. Because in the Iranian system, they said we finally figured out how to get past the air. The missile defenses, we shouldn't stop firing. But also, if the war is going to come next year anyways, now the Israelis and the back foot and the U.S. is not clearly can get involved. We should just have it now, press our advantage now rather than wait another year, and which is what they did in the end. All right. Well,

Maz, stick around for a moment because we're going to talk about what the European response has been and what the U.S. response to the European response has been. So we'll stick around after the break for this. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on I Heart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here.

This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search for it. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of He Said She Said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies.

Listen to Love Trapped on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the on-purpose podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist, and one of the most authentic voices in music today. Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health, and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight. I hate fame, I hate the word celebrity, I hate those words, that you make me uncomfortable. But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are. A guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there.

I'm in Australia when Beau is born. My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my job. I dread the conversation with my son. What do you think you'd say? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Chetty on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So a diplomatic and trade war is breaking out between the United States and Spain over Spain's refusal to allow the United States to use its bases to attack Iran. Trump was asked about this and said that, you know what, maybe he'll just cut off Spain completely. Let's roll this.

The right was given to us by the Supreme Court. And we have the right. As an example, we talked about Spain. I could tomorrow stop, or today, even better, stop everything having to do with Spain. business having to do with Spain, have the right to stop it, embargoes, do anything I want with it. And we may do that with Spain, but some of the European, like Spain has been terrible. In fact, I told Scott to cut off all dealings with Spain. Spain, first of all, it started when every European nation, at my request paid 5%, which they should be doing. And everybody

was enthusiastic about it, Germany, everybody. And Spain didn't do it. And now Spain actually said that we can't use their bases. And that's all right. We could use their base. If we want, we could just fly in and use it. Nobody's going to tell us not to use it. But we don't have to. But they were unfriendly.

And so I told him we don't want to do. Spain has absolutely nothing that we need other than great people. They have great people. But they don't have great leadership. And as you know, they were the only country that in NATO would not agree to go up to 5%. I don't think they would agree to go up to anything. They wanted to keep it at 2%. And they don't pay the 2%. So we're going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don't want anything to do with Spain.

All right. So Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez pushed back against Trump saying that he's not going to be bullied. Now Trump is probably correct. They probably could just fly in. I don't think Spain's going to shoot the U.S. planes down. But Sanchez is saying that he's standing by it. We can put up his post here. He said, the world, Europe, and Spain have faced this critical moment before. In 2003, a few irresponsible leaders dragged us into an illegal war in the Middle East that brought nothing but insecurity and pain. Our response then must be our response now. No to violations of international law. No to the illusion that we can solve the world's problems with bombs. No to repeating the mistakes of the past. No to war. Emily, how is how are how are how are, how are, how are

people feeling about this on the right? This, just Trump kind of decided that we're going to go to war and decided the entire world has to go to war with us. And now we're going to cut off Spain? Like, what does that mean? It's Trump, right? It's just, it's Trump's tactics that people have become accustomed to,

and I think some people on the right actually, frankly, enjoy Trump coming in. It's like people see it almost as Reagan coming in after Carter Malays, as it's kind of remembered in the American imagination and saying it's mourning in America again. And, you know, Trump is a much darker version of that saying it's America's mourning again. Like, we're the ones who are in charge or in control. And you have to deal with it. We're actually, like, wrangling the world.

This is our right. We have the power. And you're not going to tell us no. So let's put C2 up on the screen. This is Poland saying they will now work. on getting their own nuclear weapons. We have France that we can put up on the screen as well. This from the New York Times headline, Macron expands French nuclear arsenal and vows protection for neighbors. This is all what's transpired in less than a week. And I want to roll also Mark Carney.

Sort of the, what's the right word, arch nemesis of Trump ostensibly. Here's what he said. We can roll the thought. We support efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security. Because Canada is taking the world as it is not passively waiting for a world we wish to be. We do, however, take this position with regret because the current conflict is another example of the failure of the international order. Despite decades of UN Security Council resolutions, the tireless work of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the succession of sanctions and diplomatic frameworks, Iran's nuclear threat remains. And now the United States and Israel have acted without engaging the United Nations or consulting allies, including Canada.

So where to you from here? with a rapidly spreading conflict and growing threats to civilian life. Canada reaffirms that international law binds all belligerents. We condemn the strikes carried out by Iran on civilians and civilian infrastructure across the Middle East, and we implore all parties, including the United States and Israel, to respect the rules of international engagement. Canada calls for a rapid de-escalation of hostilities and is prepared to assist in achieving this school. To your question, Ryan, this is how Trump world sees the like, okay, nerd international relations.

This is real politic. Donald Trump has brought this transparent, naked real politic back to the White House, where it always was. This was always a pretext used to weaken the nation state, and particularly the United States, to undermine U.S. hegemony by people who want to control the world out of Davos and Brussels, as opposed to letting countries thrive or fail on their own might and power. And I think that's how, like, the, if we were trying to flesh out the meat on the bones, that's how people would say they're interpreting it. They're not particularly concerned about losing support of allies, to be honest. Yeah, and Mark Carney is a particularly good example, because he gave this, like, famous speech at Davos, where he said, you know, it's time for us to

denounce this, you know, American belligerents and hegemony and, and they're, like, the fraud that is the, you know, international rules-based order. And then within hours of the U.S. attacking Iran, he put out a statement, basically in complete lockstep support for it. Now he's out with this new thing, which you heard him say, where he's like, well, I support it. But it's also, it's kind of hypocritical and bad, and I shouldn't. But I do. Right. It's like, okay. It's unclear whether he's saying, he's saying the pretext is good. The pretext of international law

is good. And the war is good, but the war's not being done legally. Right. Yes. And so I want to talk about it, the role of the Europeans a little bit more with Mazu saying. Let's bring Drop Sites correspondent back here. Mazza, I want to talk about Europe's role here because they kind of get, I mean, good for Spain. And Spain is not the one that I'll be talking about here when I bring up last year's events, which walk through how we wound up here in this war. connecting to the snapback sanctions that the Europeans applied to Iran.

So when the U.S., you know, in 2017 walked out of the Iran nuclear deal, there was still a lot of sanctions relief from the Europeans to the Iranians because they had, Europeans had also made a nuclear deal, and Iran was abiding by the nuclear deal. but fairly recently the Europeans under pressure from the United States, you know, went pretty directly and harshly at Iran when it came to economic sanctions. So what has been the kind of European posture here? Because they're going to present some level of concern over violations of, you know, the UN and international order. But what was Europe's role, as you understand it, in pushing us to this to this situation.

Well, the original Iran nuclear deal that was signed in 2015 was involving the European countries. It's been a very critical role in mediating that. And when Trump left the deal, when you violated it, they were very upset about that. Because they view the Iran nuclear deal as a great diplomatic achievement. They wanted to avoid another Iraq.

Iraq war was extremely bad for Europe. And so they were upset when that happened. And they tried to keep the deal alive to a degree the years after in 2018, when Trump left it, tried to give the Iranian some other channels that could trade with them. But despite that, for the most part, they did abide by the Trump sanctions,

the secondary sanction, the bank and so forth. They wouldn't break those and go against those and continue dealing with Iran. They kind of threw Iran under the bus for the most part, although they tried to maintain some sort of, you know, life preserver to keep the deal at some degree above water. And that continued for a while. But, you know, two things happened in this time.

When the Trump were nagged on the deal and you re-in pulled the sanctions, the Iranians stopped completely complying with the deal. They started to enrich uranium beyond the limits set out in the deal itself. Up to 60% enrichment, I think 90% is a weapons grade. So they were clearly trying to signal that they had leverage. And if you keep doing this to them, they could maybe develop a weapon one day without actually doing that. But basically, they were not in just like Trump was no longer abiding by the deal. They weren't also completely imbuying by the deal. They were at least scurting up against the edges of it a lot.

So that put them technically out of compliance. But then the other thing that happened, which is a huge, I think, the impact on the European view of the situation is that when the Ukraine war broke out, the Iranians started arming Russia and Ukraine. They start arming them with these Shahid drones. They helped build Shah had drone factories in Russia. And that became a very, very big part of the war, in fact. The Shah had a huge impact on the war for a time.

And the Russians had a huge impact on the war for a time. helping them. And, you know, that, that relationship really radicalizes Europeans, I think, on the subject. Because, you know, before that, their relationship with Iran was, they were like a middleman between Trump, the Iranians, and between Trump and the Iranians. But now they've become completely hostile. They openly talk about regime changing Iran. I do think that that's a decision by the Iranians to do that, contribute to that a lot. And now, you know, this is the sort of strange quandary because now all these European countries have basically said that we are done with Iran. We expect a new government to emerge there. But they haven't explained how that's going

to happen. They haven't really, they've kind of put Trump in the driver's seat and Trump doesn't seem to have any intention of doing that. So it's kind of like leaves it in a very strange position. And you know, the speech by Mark Carney is very interesting because first of all, he gave this very, of course, you know, very revelatory at the time and very popular speech at Davos about the new world order. But now he's back to saying all the same things again quite quickly. And I think there's a couple of things here. First of all, there was a big Iranian diaspora and Canada. It's very politically vocal and they're very anti-governments. They're very pro the Shah for the most part. But also, you know, I think that Canada doesn't really have many

options actually, because if you are going to be a non-aligned multipolar kind of, you know, that's the message that you're trying to send, then you don't really have the power to do that for the most part. You kind of have left to signal back to the same international laws and rules that you're just saying were irrelevant. And I think that the Canadian position really does mimic the European position in many ways because they both are sort of dependent on whatever the the U.S. is doing and reduced to kind of giving a commentary on that. But I do think that if the U.S. go ahead with destroying Iran entirely, that will not end well for Europe. Europe will definitely be impacted, even if America is not as directly because of the geographical proximity.

And Iraq, the Iraq war was devastating for Europe, as I mentioned earlier. The Iran war will be much, much worse. But the fact that they don't really have the autonomy, they didn't really have the vision of how to act independently. It means that they're just going to sit back effectively and watch It's trying to hit them if it does. Haviv Radegur wrote a whole piece in the free press about how this is actually specifically just about China. This is all Trump can't say it for whatever reason because he doesn't want to, I guess the reason that Haviv gives,

is that he doesn't want to antagonize China, but this is actually, at the end of the day, all about China. Mark Carney has been in hot water for what Trump world sees as overtures to China. And I'm curious, Ma's, how you see the bricks, China dynamic playing out in the minds of like a Mark Carney or Davos world as they consider international law in regard to what's happened over the last week because obviously that's something Brick's country is China. They use examples exactly like this to say, what do you mean

international law? So can you give us some perspective on how that could play out in the weeks and months ahead? Well, I meet Chinese media and social media on a regular basis. And there's not really a tremendous interest in the subject, the most part. The Chinese government does not have huge trade ties in Iran. It's quite limited and lopsided the trade that they do have with Iran. The one thing they do trade is oil. They buy oil from Iran. But it's very, it's like a, it's a fungible resource, first of all, but it's also kind of a warped relationship. They don't, they kind of abide by the sanctions for the most part, vis-a-vis Iran. They don't have a defense partnership. They don't have depends of operation.

They don't sell Iran, advance weapons. They don't have a historic trust with them and so forth. They buy a lot of oil, though, right? It's like 90% of Iranian crude exports. It's the Chinese market. Yes, but it's only about 10 to 15% or 10 to 12% of China's imports. So it's much more important to the Iranians and it's the Chinese. It could be replaced for the Chinese worst case.

Or they would even buy it from a different Iranian government. Or if the Iranian government collapsed and still sold oil, that's fine with them. They don't have a strategic bad partnership with them. The country, they have a strategic relationship. with our North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, and Belarus. And Iran is not really on that list in any way. So I think they're trying to say it's about China is attempting to make this seem like it's about America in a way because China is very important to America.

But Iran is not important to China. And that's manifested in the lack of support and lack of, you know, any kind of material aid that they provide to the Iranians or even attempts to try to stop the war from happening. So I don't think that, you know, and I think that one thing is doing it, I think it's already done this before, but the idea of international law, it's kind of becoming ridiculous in a way, like international law and sense of war and crime and things like this. The Chinese are not expecting that's going to protect them. That's why they're building tons of missiles, and that's why they're expanding the Navy and Air Force at a tremendous rate, because they know that they're not

expecting this to take something that's going to, they can rely on. One thing that they have noticed about the Iran war is the way that the U.S. dealt with the Iranians during negotiations. They use negotiations as a stalling tactic to mass more forces as a tool of deception and so forth. And they will assume that in a negotiation with the U.S. in the future, potentially over Taiwan or an issue like that, that they may do the same to them. And they will treat any negotiation with that suspicion and with that cynicism about what the actual goals are. But beyond that, they're not emotionally invested in the Middle East. They don't have bases there. They don't have any real footprint per se.

As long as the oil keeps coming from the few select spots that it comes from, that's fine. And they really have much more deep economic ties with the Gulf states, to be honest. That's much more important to them than Iran is. So I don't really find that this is targeted towards China, because China is just not that impacted by it. It's really hurting everybody else, though, especially to people in the Gulf states who are directly bordering Iran. Yeah. And just to connect a few dots from this segment, we talked about Paul

Poland saying that it's going to now race for a nuclear weapon. We talked about France saying that it's going to kind of expand its nuclear capacity. And that's all related to Russia and to their Europeans' concern about Russian aggression toward them. So it's interesting that the way that you talked about the Iran and Russia relationship developing more tightly as a result of Trump walking away from the Iran nuclear deal, and then Iran supplying drones and other military technology to Iran and tightening that link. So in a world where Trump doesn't walk away from the Iran nuclear deal, do you imagine that the U.S. and Europe would have had more leverage at the time and presently to say to Iran, look, this is a war between Ukraine and Russia, you know, see your way out of this.

We don't want you supplying these drones. Look, your economy is booming. We've released these sanctions. This nuclear deal is where everybody's abiding by it. Don't rock this apple cart. So I'm kind of trying to figure out, like, was that a decision that actually heightened tensions between Russia and Europe in a way that wouldn't necessarily happened if Trump hadn't just gone in and because Obama's name was on the nuclear deal and because the Israelis wanted him to rip it up, they just ripped it up.

Yeah, there's no doubt about it. And you know, this strategic cooperation that the Iranians and the Russians asked, specifically the Shah had drones, that was not even reciprocated in a strategic manner by Russia. They just paid for them. Because Iranians need money to their sanctions. So they gave them gold transfers and maybe cryptocurrency or other ways that they paid them outside the international financial system. That was the what the Iranians got out of.

But the Iran, Russians are not rushing to defend Iran or even arming Iran with a Russian weaponry to tremendous degree, you know, in a strategic way. Maybe they're selling them something, but not in a way which is just out of alliance. So really, it was just out of economic, first to stick it to the Europeans, I guess, say that, you know, we have leverage to. But also for economic reasons. That was the overriding reason, really, why they start selling weapons to Russia. And, you know, this is actually one of the most important things about this entire issue. the Iranian nuclear program has never been used as a tool of ensuring Iranian national survival by developing a weapon, nor has it even been really used as a tool for developing power in Iran,

per se, like electricity. They have huge electricity shortage in Iran. The number one reason for the Iranian nuclear program has been as leverage to negotiate their economic reintegration with the West. That's why they didn't develop a weapon. That's why they didn't actually integrate into national goods and so forth. They were trying to use this as a tool that we're on the aisle. We need to get back in.

How do you generate leverage? We can do it this way. And I think it's a very poor decision. And I think that if you're going to develop a nuclear program and even enrich outside of normal bounds, you pretty much are locked in. You better go all the way and build the bomb or don't build the program at all.

But they try to go halfway in this way, which is very typical of the governing style, the former Supreme Leader of al-Iqahmani. You try to be the situation of lukewarm sort of nuclearization and lukewarm hostility with Europe and so forth. and even the U.S. So I think that that is the ultimate error that the Iranian has made. If you compare that to countries like North Korea or Pakistan and so forth,

who treated the nuclear weapon as a tool of national survival and ran for it at any cost. There's a famous quote by former Pakistan Prime Minister. He said that we will build a nuclear weapon. We have to eat grass for 100 years after this. And that's what they did. Pakistan, you know, did suffer a lot for that, but, you know, Pakistan exists today, whereas maybe Iran won't. And I think that this is a broader subtext of the history.

sort of weird negotiation that they've taken place with the Europeans and Americans over many, many years, and which is now culminating this disastrous outcome for the Iranians. Yeah. I kind of hate knowing stuff about the world because it just makes it that much more miserable, knowing that it could be different. It's bleak. Anyway, very bleak. Maas, thank you so much for joining us.

People can check out your reporting over at DropSight News. Appreciate you being here. Thanks, thanks. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart.

And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan.

He became the first Bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one-night stand. and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract.

Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search warrant. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of He Said She Said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. Listen to Love Trapped on the Eye Heart. radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the on-purpose podcast.

I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today. Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health, and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight. I hate fame. I hate the word celebrity. I hate those words. They make me uncomfortable.

But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame. or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Beau is born. My whole identity is that no matter what,

I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my job. I dread the conversation with my son. What do you think you'd say? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Chetty on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, as we're recording this, it's 9.25 a.m., the CNBC headline is SMP 500. Futures tick higher as crude oil trades lower after Iran conflict surge. That's, again, what it's showing right now.

By the time you see this, markets will be open. But Ryan, I want to roll this clip of Donald Trump responding to questions yesterday in the Oval Office about oil prices. It's a midterm election year. He's focused on cost of living as his team continues to say, D1, this is Trump, on what could happen, what that might mean for him in the near future with oil and gas prices. I'll tell you what, I have never had more compliments on something that did. People felt it's something that had to be done. So if we have a little high oil prices for a little while, but as soon as this ends,

those prices are going to drop, I believe, low. than even before. And he rolled out his plan for the Strait of Hermuz on Truth Social. Let's put the next element up on the screenwriting. Effective immediately, I've ordered the U.S. Development Finance Corporation to provide at a very reasonable price, political risk insurance and guarantees for the financial security of all maritime trade, especially energy, traveling through the Gulf. This will be available to all shipping lines.

If necessary, the U.S. Navy will begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hermuz as soon as possible no matter what. the U.S. will ensure the free flow of energy to the world. The U.S.'s economic military might is the greatest on earth. More actions to come. Thank you for your attention to this matter. In D3, we can go ahead and put latest oil barrel prices up on the screen. So this would actually be, as of yesterday, I think is when we got this graphic in.

So, yeah, crude oil prices surge above $77 a barrel to their highest level since January 21st, 25 one day after President Trump's inauguration. And then Kobasey letter says on X little commentary, the entire oil price decline under President Trump has now been erased. So you can see why he's eager to downplay any concerns or to undercut concerns by saying, well, this is, this is great for other reasons. Oil prices is something we might have to put up with Ryan. Reaction to Trump's comments yesterday. Yeah. And it's, it's ticking. I just noticed it's ticking down a couple bucks down about $73 or $74. It'll much depend on if and when this ends. Trump's promise that he is going to escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz

and also reinsure them is quite an aggressive step. Reinsurance basically runs the world. That is the actual cabal that runs it. You know, if we stop insuring properties in Florida, for instance, like, forget it. Like, that's it. And so the way that this works is these massive oil tankers have insurance. And it costs a particular amount to get through, you know, a particular part of the world. And the reinsurers, once Iran said the Strait of Hormuz is closed, said, forget it. Like, we're not backing these up because, for obvious reasons.

And so Trump is saying, all right, two things. We'll send in the Navy, and we will use our own, basically tax dollars through this development finance corporation to offer the insurance itself. And so then it's up to the ships to risk it. Now, the Navy has subsequently said, actually, we don't really have a whole lot of capacity to do this escorting. So all of a sudden, they started getting calls. Hey, I've got a ship stuck. Help me out. Like, no, it's just, we didn't really mean that. But here's the process to get some insurance. So Iran has been attacking a couple tankers and hitting them, and it doesn't take much to completely seize them up.

Meanwhile, you put up D4, they've said, and we'll see, you know, how effective this is, they've said that Chinese and Russian vessels can get through, which would be ironic if then the U.S. says, well, no, no, they can't. We're closing them. and or do these oil tankers that are stuck reach out to the Chinese and re-flag themselves as Chinese and China then gets half of it or something? And maybe, like, we'll, you know, we'll see. Meanwhile, it's, I think, so it's March, right?

We're going to be talking about primaries next with the David Soroda and Dave Weigel. midterms are coming. I don't, you know, I don't know if it's true that the public thinks that this is the greatest thing anybody's ever done and that they're willing to pay higher gas and energy prices. Because independence definitely don't and won't. Yeah, and it's not just that you're pushing, you might push to like $4 a gallon or something like that. It's not just, it filters through the entire economy.

Yeah. Trump actively, you know, smashed very deliberately and proudly any attempt to move to renewable energy. And so everything in the economy runs on fossil fuels is, oh, if you push up that price, everything then gets more expensive. And I can't imagine that people are going to be like, oh, well, that's good because at least Israel got to have its war with Iran. Well, that's why they were so freaked out about the messaging as we covered earlier, which I think we're arguing is reflective of a conflicted, muddled, inconclusive strategy itself, sort of sprung from that well. But that's why they're freaked out

about it because now when people are looking back on, huh, why are these prices higher? Well, there are these clips that are going to ring in their minds if they follow the news very closely about Mark Arrubia saying, well, we heard Israel was going to strike, or Mike Johnson saying we heard Israel is going to strike. Democrats will use that. Sympathy for Israel among voters has plummeted. And that means independence, particularly, if you need them to turn out in a place like North Carolina for Republicans, you have a problem. So let's turn to developments from Qatar. This is the next element. Cutter Energy to stop downstream production. Cutter Energy values its relationship with all of its stakeholders and will continue to communicate the latest

available information. Natural gas, yeah. Yep, LNG. And then the next element, this is the Reuters headline, Cutter Smelter shutdown exacerbates Iran-war aluminum. fears, the impact of the U.S. Israeli attacks on Iran on the aluminum sector deepened on Tuesday after Qatari smelter, Khatollum began to shut down and shareholder Norsk Hydro issued a force measure to customers. Ryan, everything's going according to plan. Right. So this is the way that things cascade through the economy. And so the South Korean market, which has been surging throughout the year, had an absolutely massive sellout, sell off. It hit one of those circuit breaker. where they're like, okay, just stop trading. This is an absolute catastrophe. You've, you've had other

Asian markets selling off as well. So far, the U.S. markets have, you know, they're volatile, but they're like, you know, they haven't been completely rocked yet. We'll see what, we'll see what happens today. But, you know, this stuff then starts to become self-reinforcing. Yeah, if you are leveraged in, you know, in a market that dives, and now you've got margin calls coming in, you have to meet that, then you have to sell off other assets in order to pay that, and then that dives, and then you have to sell off those ads. So that's why. And then you have all of these AIs out there trading in ways where they're trying to, like, you know, find little arbitrage around the world. And so that, you know, that can, you know, produce some kind of run, runaway moves once you. once you break through, you know, thresholds that people expect to be, you know, to be stable. And bear mind, there is no regime change plan. Donald Trump just said that in the Oval Office yesterday.

He said, we don't know if it'll be better or worse. We don't actually know if it's Pala V or someone else. And so the certainty for people who are triting and trying to make financial decisions here is absent. Yeah. Nobody has any yet. I mean, this is already in the broader tariff climate, which is putting a lot of uncertainty, injecting a lot of uncertainty. into the markets right now. So incredibly shaky global economy. I mean, it's always shaky, but right now the fragility is on another level. Yeah, and I think to me this is the markets and the economy and oil prices are everything. And I think Iran understands that. The only language that Trump really understands is this, is money, is affordability, which is called a hoax and which

is advisors, I'm sure, every time die inside when he says that. And when he says things like, yeah, people can handle a little bit of, pay a little more. Because I've never gotten so many compliments. I've never had so many compliments. Sir, just absolutely incredible, sir. I weep with joy every time I pay more at the pump, just so that I can sacrifice on behalf of your genius and brilliance and bravery. Yeah, that'll go well in North Carolina and Texas.

I'm Clayton Neckard. In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. But here's the thing. Bachelor fans hated him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. That's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a courtroom. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract.

Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. Listen to Love Trapped on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Chetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. No matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children.

I dread the conversation with my son. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Chetty on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get. Get your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, The Case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? Evidence has been made to fit. The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed.

What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe? Oh my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.