Bulwark Takes - Why Iran’s Regime Isn’t Falling (w/ Tim Mak)

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

JVL is joined by war reporter Tim Mak to discuss the rapidly escalating conflict with Iran and what it means for the United States, Ukraine, and global stability. They examine why the Iranian regime may be more durable than many assume, the strategic limits of military strikes, and how rising oil prices are shaping political decisions in Washington.Read more from Tim Mak at The Counteroffensive: https://www.counteroffensive.news/

The Bell Air Direct app includes crash assist, which detects an accident the moment it happens, and even offers you emergency assistance at the tap of a button. Okay, but what if I don't have an accident? Well, just keep on, keeping on. Bell Air Direct, insurance, simplified. Conditions apply. Hey, Ontario, come on down to BetMGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick.

Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show. Only at BetMGM. Access to the Price is right Fortune Pick is only available at BetMGM Casino. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you,

please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGMGEM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hello friends. I'm JVL and I am joined today by Tim Mack from the counteroffensive here on Substack, one of my favorite substack publications. And so Tim went to, if you don't know, his backstory, he went over to Ukraine basically as soon as the war broke out years ago now and became, I think, the most indispensable person on Substack reporting on the ground from Ukraine day in the day out. His stuff's been invaluable. And he stood up, as he was just telling us, just a pop-up publication about Iran.

And so, Tim, tell me where do they, where can they get it? If they just go to the counteroffensive, can they go from there? Do they have to go follow and do another click? The best way to find our reporting on Iran is at Iranwar. Dot news. And it's on substack as Iran war dispatches. But if you go to Iranwar. You'll be able to find our latest obsessive reporting on Iran, but with the counteroffensive style,

which the counterfeensive has really. really been about human interest reporting. And so we've brought that over to Iran's storytelling. So for Iran war dispatches, we are covering how Iranian farmers are dealing with the ecological effects of these attacks on oil holding sites in Tehran. There's been this black rain phenomenon that you may have heard of that's been occurring. I haven't. Tell me. Tell me about it. Well, this black rain phenomenon following the bombing of IRGC oil depots, there's been reports that we received, and from our sources, photos of black rain falling in Tehran. Basically, the oil and the smoke and the ecological impact of what's happened is really affecting farmers in that region, which have already been devastated. by a drought. You could argue that actually the genesis of a lot of what we're seeing in Iran right now

isn't necessarily the protests that happened last year or the Israeli bombing as part of the 12-day war or the strikes that are ongoing right now. What really is the genesis of all the upheaval in Iran is the drought, as simple as that, is that access to water has been extremely, extremely limited. government even talked about moving the capital outside of Tehran because of the access to water being such a problem. And that access to water being a problem has led to dramatic increases in the price of everything, right? And inflation, along with political repression, has led to demonstrations. And those demonstrations then led to the killings of tens of thousands of Iranians just seeking their freedom. And subsequent to that, the Israeli and American body.

in Iran. So it may all come down to, I think there's a good argument for it, that it all comes down to Iranian farmers suffering through a drought. Well, I mean, this is a thing that we saw in various American defense publications for like the last decade, which is like, hey, climate change can cause regional instability. We ought to be cognizant of environmental effects. And I guess we don't care about that anymore. So I guess I have so many questions for you. And so I wish I had a coherent way of asking him. And I don't.

I'm just going to sort of scattershot my way through that. I hope that's okay. The first thing is when you, when you have your reporter, especially, you know, the person you have on the Armenian border talking about people, did the people, did the Iranians who are leaving the country who you guys have heard from, were they surprised? Did they expect coming after the June strikes that there would be a major, not just bombings, but like major military campaigns coming from the U.S. and Israel six months later, five months later? I don't think there's a great amount of surprise, particularly among the people who oppose the regime. There's a lot of support as well. I think from their point of view, put aside who's doing it. They're attacking the people who have harmed us.

And I praise them for that. And, you know, I know you've written about the total lack of strategy in the American engagement here in the war and the lack of an ability to follow through and the jokers from the State Department to the Pentagon who have no coherency in terms of aims or objectives or tools to reach either. But from the perspective of people who are seeking freedom in Iran, even if they don't get regime change, the United States and Israel are harming the people who have harmed them. And they can live with that. And so there is that there is kind of that part of it. But given the upheaval that's happened in Iran over the last 18 months, these latest strikes hardly seem like a surprise. They seem more like the culmination of the kind of the kind of. And it's the kind of. of violence that's been growing and breeding in Iran over the last year and a half. So for the people who are trying to get out, I mean, what is the plan for refugee? Is there a plan? Does it seem as though anybody has prepared for, huh, we may have a refugee crisis here. What are we going to do about it? Like, where are these folks supposed to go? Who's going to take care of them? What's been curious is so right now I'm in Armenia, and Armenia and Iran have these deep historic ties of friendship.

And so there are a lot, they're quite a lot, one of the reasons we decided to set up around war dispatches in Armenia, as opposed to other places, is that it's relatively free. And there are a lot of Iranian exiles and expats here that we can communicate with, network, and get information from, which is really the kind of core of networking and reporting. And what surprised me, though, is that there are fewer people. who have fled the country into Armenia than I expected.

One of the reasons is because Iran is a very, very, very big country. Yeah. And that if you leave Tehran and you go into, for example, the mountainous northern regions, you could be pretty assured that you're not going to be affected by airstrikes, right? There are, there's, you know, no targets there. And it is one of the things that you kind of reflect on when, as the United States considers, whether a limited or larger scale, boots in the ground presence, if they do kind of want to engage that way,

is that Iran is, you know, much larger than Iraq with the mountains of Afghanistan as its terrain features. You know, I mean, it is very hostile territory, very large. And Iran is large enough to be able to, you know, to be able to have this war and, and people be displaced internally, but not yet externally. You contrast that, for example, with Lebanon, which as a result of strikes in the south of Lebanon,

led by the Israelis, has led to many, many thousands of refugees fleeing for safety in a much smaller country. So that really is one of the main reasons why we haven't seen 100,000 people try to leave. overnight. So from the reporting I've been reading, it seems pretty clear that military commanders in both the U.S. and Israel have basically given up on regime change in any sort of timeline that can be counted on. So it doesn't mean that the Iranian regime is forever, but like it isn't going to go away tomorrow and it probably won't go away next week. And if it were to fall, the Islamic Republic where to fall, that would require a category difference in terms of both

intervention and duration, and the timeline for that would be indeterminate. The political leadership in at least Israel and possibly in America does not seem to have reconciled themselves to this and seems to believe that regime change is still an outcome on the table. The people you're talking to on the ground, and again, I'm sure you're talking to a lot of of different groups. What does the sense seem to be about the stability of the Iranian regime? Because I mean, I look at this and I just sort of about this today. It does seem to me as though Iran has just passed two very, very significant tests. The first of which is they survived a decapitation strike from the U.S. and Israel. The second of which is they survived a transition

of power. So they've moved from one supreme leader to another supreme leader, which is not all, you If you're in an authoritarian country, those transitions are always fraught. You never know, things can fall apart at those moments. So they've done that. They've just endured a stress test, which seems pretty useful information to have if you were part of the Islamic Republic. I mean, that suggests that, okay, the mosaic, you know, all the contingencies that you've been planning for basically since the Iran-Iraq war, your strategic goal, your doctrine, at least hasn't been disproven so far. Maybe it hasn't been proven, but it hasn't been disproven.

And what you set up to do, disperse command and control, survival ship protocols for the regime, mosaic defense plan, which sort of the idea is to push control out to all 31 provinces and be decentralized. Just military doctrine of not engaging in direct force-on-force conflicts and resorting to asymmetrical warfare, those things are looking reasonably successful. So from the people you're talking to,

the people you're seeing, what are the views of regime survival for Iran? Like, what do people think the near-term future of that looks like? I want to make a bigger, broader point. That's more of a caveat and then narrow in on your specific point. So the bigger, broader point, is that autocratic regimes are brittle structures. When they bend and they break, right? And that they can break very suddenly. If you look at the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, it happened

in quite breakneck speed. If you look at the fall of the Assad regime, it happens over a course of 72 hours, maybe five days. And what really leads to the collapse of an autocratic regime? it really isn't, it wasn't in either of those cases, some sort of external threat bombing them into submission. It was individual soldiers, individual people deciding they no longer wanted to hold up the structure of the regime, that they were no longer ready to fire on their fellow citizens in order to keep that institution of power alive. The thing about Iran right now is that it's very much, degraded to the point to probably its lowest point since 1979, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have incredible potency and incredible violent ability, that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

still has close to 200,000 people that are still alive, that are still armed, that are still able to inflict violence on their fellow citizens. And the very sad conclusion, that we're getting from a lot of folks that we're talking to who have come out of Iran or currently in Iran, is that these strikes came too late. And that what happened in the devastating Iranian response to the demonstrations earlier this year is that the killings of tens of thousands of protesters,

the people who would have risen up now to take advantage of these strikes, they're all dead. That the IRGC didn't merely shoot them in the streets, but then went into hospitals and went room to room, executing people who had been wounded in protests, vulnerable people who had sought refuge in places of medicine. And these people are gone and they won't come back. And who knows how long it will take for these thousands upon thousands of people

demonstrations and folks with the kind of courage that it takes, the kind of courage that I've never had, to stand before guns and say, I demand to be free. That is no small request. And the people who did have that courage unfortunately died for it. And you can't replace that easily. That is that is that is that is really you know that right now the the the thing that's missing and that's not to say anything negative of the people of Iran who want their freedom now, but having just gone through this terribly traumatic event and not once a not not quite not very long ago.

Right. It's hard for that to say to them, okay, well, why don't you get get back out there guys. Yeah. it might be easy for us to say. But to your point here, I mean, the classical way in which regimes, authoritarian regimes fall is they fall from internal defections, right? And so it is the external pressures which can either be from third parties like, you know, say America and Israel or from internal dissident movements. Those things exist in order to cause the, the, members of the ruling regime, enough people in there to realize the current status quo can't keep me safe. I've got to switch sides and go to this other new emerging status quo, which

can keep me safe. And that's how regime's fall. The problem here is that it is not clear what potential alternative could emerge to keep, say, the IRGC people who need to defect safe, right? There does not seem to be another within the regime cohort that would do that. Certainly does not seem like the Iranian Freedom movement would be able to do that. And so like if you were just like working this through as a test case, you would say, well, obviously what you would need is like a coalition of foreign troops to come in and guarantee safety and guarantee internal security so that

that Iranians could stand up a new form of government. And I just find it difficult to believe that that will happen. But maybe I'm wrong. The Iranians are, for all their evil, are deadly precise and deadly proficient in asymmetric warfare. The Iranians were responsible for no small number, likely in the thousands of American soldiers killed due to IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specific kinds of IEDs, by the way, that yielded devastating force even among up-armored vehicles that the American military has. So the idea of some sort of round assault in large waves, I fear it would be a terrible mistake. But one of the things that has been suggested is, is to arm Iranian Kurds in the northern areas of the country

to create a sort of rebellion within. There's been some suggestion that the American intelligence services or the Massad and or the Mossad are doing that right now. There are also a group called the Iraqi of Iraqi Kurds that are in eastern Iraq who could theoretically be armed and then act as a rebel force against the central Iranian government. But as you can imagine, that comes with all sorts of other risks and uncertainties. Hard to do that without providing them lots of, like, I mean, again, just classically,

the way this would work is the outside power like America would provide them with military training and leadership, right? We'd have officers on the ground, teaching them doctrine, we'd give them them. intelligence, would be giving them air cover, we'd be establishing no fly zones, right? I mean, to do that in a way which has any reasonable chance of success seems to demand a level of involvement that I find it difficult to imagine would be sustainable in America right now. The Bell Air Direct app includes crash assist, which detects an accident the moment it happens and even offers you emergency assistance at the tap of a button. Okay, but what if I don't have an accident? Well, just keep on, keeping on.

Bel Air Direct, insurance, simplified, conditions apply. Is that crazy to say or now? So when we launched the counteroffensive, we had a tagline, Good Morning to Readers, Keeve Remains, and Ukrainian Hands. For our Iran coverage at Iran War Dispatches, we've been trying to think, okay, well, what would we do to, what is the question that we want to answer every morning? What does an American reader really want to understand

And so our kind of byline, our daily shoutout is a lot more mercenary than it was in Ukraine. Every morning we talk about the price of crude oil. Good morning to readers. The price of crude oil is X and has gone up Y percent since the Iran war started. Because when you think about, you know, the conduct of the war and the ability of really any American president to conduct a war, it really has to do with the price foil here. The problem is that as the Trump administration finds itself more and more constrained due to the rising price of oil, which is today, again, over $100 barrel. I've learned a lot about oil price benchmarks in the last week, we can have.

Yeah, I have a friend with a Bloomberg terminal subscription who is constantly sending me screenshots of the futures curve and stuff. And it's, yeah, we're all learning new things. The thing is that the Trump administration has very foolishly stated that they will decide when the war ends. That is not a decision that you get to make on your own, unfortunately. one of the big problems and one of the strategic issues around this whole war is the is the the straight of Hormuz, there's this key choke point where 20% of world energy naval supply moves through. And you can say the war is over. But as long as the Iranian military and the IRGC decide to keep that straight closed,

there's going to be this deepening tension, this tightening tension where the reason why the United States is looking for an easy withdrawal is not going to diminish. You could say it's over, but the reason the Trump administration is feeling so much pressure to end it is because of rising oil prices. But if you end it and the price of oil doesn't go down, well, that defeats the whole purpose of trying to end it to begin. Right. And so- Can I just bribe the Iranian regime though? Well, the Iranian regime actually, I mean, there's been some reporting today that suggests that the Iranian regime is in no mood to have any conversations with Steve Whitkov or the Trump administration. And their perspective is, we were negotiating with you when the war started. Right.

Why will we talk to you now? And so, you know, and this is- That's the position you take when you think you're winning, by the way. That is a position that you take when you think you're winning. And if you listen to Iranian officials, they are speaking with increasing optimism about how they've weathered the worst parts of the joint Israeli-American attacks. And that actually the initiative moving forward is on their side. I wouldn't quite take that position. The United States dominates the era over their country.

But at the same point, they have a lot of different assets. I'm reminded by the Taliban saying, actually, that NATO has the clocks, but we have the time. And the Iranians don't have the technology. They don't have, you know, really complicated, expensive air assets over the country. But they do have time on their side. And they do have rising oil prices, causing these restrictions on American freedom, political freedom to act on their side. And if Trump decides to withdraw in some sort of elegant or inelegant way, I think they'll make the Trump administration pay a price for that. So let me tell you my fear of this.

my fear is at the most likely outcome. The Trump decides he needs an exit. And I do believe that there are things that he can give the Iranian regime, which would allow them to allow him to declare victory. For instance, long-term easing sanctions and sort of renormalizing Iran and the regime and allowing them to have some economic prosperity, which then makes their hold on power internally stronger and more resilient over time. Right?

This is what he can offer them. And the Israelis sure wouldn't want that, but the Israelis aren't going to really have much of a say. I don't think if the Americans decide they're done with this war, then they're going to be done with the war. And we just have too much leverage over Israel for Israel to do more than, you know, Well, here's what's crazy about that. So I do worry that, like, we, this all ends in a week or a month or two months.

And the end result is that a lot of material has been blown up. We've had a leadership change within the regime. But in terms of internal dynamics, the Iranian regime actually winds up with a stronger position in terms of internal control. I think that would be a pretty bad outcome, but it feels like it's the most likely outcome. The thing is that what's so perverse about this is that the easing of sanctions in return for normalization of relations is what the Iran nuclear deal was all about. Right. And what the Obama administration. So a deal which Trump himself tore up, a deal with Trump himself tore up after the Iranians already received the money that had been frozen, which had been the biggest strike against. against the deal. So the Iranians get their money. Then Iran, then, then, then, uh, then Trump removes the restrictions on Iran's freedom to, uh, to, uh, to develop its nuclear program. Then, then, um,

snapback sanctions occur. Then, uh, then the United States attacks. Then the, what the outcome is that they get their money. They get sanctions relief. And, uh, and, and what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, happened there other than the killing of the Ayatollah. But that's like classic Trump, right? You set a fire, you then put the fire out and you tell everybody, look at it, the fire's gone, right?

This is, that's kind of how he does everything. I don't, why I'd be surprised if that was, if the outcome was some sort of negotiated settlement in the near term is I think the Iranians would like to see the American

administration squirm. a little bit. Yeah. And then furthermore, the regimes don't collapse when they're attacked by a foreign force. They collapse when they give into a foreign force, right? When they, when they are, when they are seen as weak, when they are seen as being unable to protect the nation's sovereignty, at this point, what the Iranian government is not, is not acting in order to appeal to or, you know, shore up its support among the protesters who want the bureaucratic, uh, is not acting. Uh, is not, autocracy dead. They're looking to, they're looking at the kind of center of Iranian society to ensure people, right, that what we're just, the point we were discussing before, which the Iranian government

and the Iranian military still remain the most powerful pillars and institutions, and they will exist tomorrow as they have existed yesterday. If you give in and you say, okay, well, yeah, you bombed us, but well, let's make a deal. suddenly that message is not so clear. Yeah. I mean, I guess it all hinges on. Is there a deal that can be made which allows each party to plausibly claim victory internally? Right.

So can Trump plausibly claim victory in America such that the Republican voters buy it? He doesn't need everybody to buy it. He just needs Republican voters to buy it. And in Iran, could the Mullahs claim victory? in a way that, you know, the places where their support matters most are able to buy it. I don't know. I feel like it's probably easier from the Iranian side because you will, I mean, simply surviving an all-out attack by the great Satan and the little Satan is itself something

no Middle Eastern country has ever done. So, I mean, it feels pretty important. Are you concerned about the war widening? I've seen, like Noah Smith wrote a like, oh, maybe this is the foothills of World War III post. That strikes me as a pretty low probability event. I do find it hard to see the war widening, but I don't know. From where you said, you're in the region. What does it look like and feel like?

Well, the first week of the war, I mean, you could definitely see. see the war widening, right? And from my perspective, you know, I normally live in Kiev. Now, right now, I'm spending some time in Armenia here covering the Iran war. I see these as as terribly, terribly interconnected wars. One of the major reasons for these strikes on Iran is that, or the freedom to strike Iran is that Russia is otherwise engaged weakened. and occupied with Ukraine. The Russian support for Iran, which has been one of its greatest allies in the Middle East,

is not there. And it's not there because they can't afford to help their ally. It's been mostly symbolic support. And then when I'm in Ukraine, when I listen at night and I hear drones in the skies above my apartment, what I'm hearing are Iranian-designed Shahid drones, blowing up in the city. And so I see these as deeply interconnected, certainly more interconnected in some ways than even the global war on terror was when you think about Iraq and

Iran and North Korea. Russia, Iran, and North Korea are much more connected than terrorist networks in that time were. We've seen as a result of this Iran war. We've seen as a result of this Iran war, strikes on Cyprus, Cyprus, which is an EU member. We've seen attacks on Azerbaijan, the airport in Azerbaijan, which is a key kind of route between Europe and Asia that isn't that isn't either Russian or Iranian. We've seen attacks, as you know, in all across Middle East, I think over two dozen countries. But I guess what, what, what, would qualify as World War III, if not this. Maybe this is not World War III because it's not long enough.

Maybe it's because not enough, quote, unquote, great powers are involved. But what it does, I think, is remove some of the restrictions on great powers which have been in place since World War II to prevent a World War III. It has removed, for example, any moral authority for the United States to condemn, I hope, I hope it never happens, China invading Taiwan. Right. And in a lot of ways, has created a lot of data which the Iranians will, are likely to share with their friends in China, about drone usage, about air defenses, and et cetera, et cetera. One of my great fears is, and we did a story about this on Iran War Dispatches, was about we did this deep dive into the kinds of munitions that were being used at great speed as a result of the first week of the Iran War.

And what we found was not only were the Americans and their allies in the Middle East using patriot missiles and interceptors at an incredible pace, but that the United States is manufacturing so few of these interceptors that there would never, there simply will not be enough time between now and 2027 when a theoretical Taiwan invasion might take place for the United States to replenish stocks of anti-missile and air defense interceptors. That is a terrifying idea that really Trump had at the beginning of this war had a choice to make.

And that is either attack Iran or protect Taiwan. And he's already made that choice whether he knows it or not. By the very tools that he has before him, his decision to attack Iran in this way. And then to expand air defense assets in the way that was necessary. to defend American lives and those of our allies. We've already made a tacit decision to not defend Iran. And that is kind of horrifying to me. I mean, not just Taiwan.

We've pulled out THAAD systems out of South Korea, which are part of the matrix that hold the North Koreans at bay. So here's one of the many tangential concerns I have, I imagine as yours, is the consumption of, key material that should be going to Ukraine. And just, you need Patriot missiles, right? You need to be able to sell anti-missile and anti-drone weapons to Ukraine. It would be better if we were giving them to Ukraine, but we don't do that anymore.

I mean, those stores are just being depleted, as you said. To what extent are the Ukrainians going to feel that? Does this endanger them and thus, like, like also broader European stability. Yeah, it's a terror, it's, it's really a bad situation that the Americans and the Europeans and the Ukrainians find themselves in. Zelensky quipped, I'm not sure exactly which day, but over the last week, that, and this is true, by the way, that the, that America and its Middle East allies expended more Patriot interceptors in a week than had been provided to Ukraine over the course of four years of warfare. And by the way, the Ukrainians are using every last one in a strategic way, trying to target only the missiles that, only the hypersonic missiles that pose the greatest danger to Ukrainian lives.

But the fact is that we're going to see a lot more, we're going to see a lot more bombings and strikes in Ukraine that are unanswered or unintercepted because there's just not. to sell to the Europeans to give to the Ukrainians. That is just a fact. You know, I do a lot of writing and thinking about defense technology and one of the new developments, we track Russian defense technology really, really closely and what they're doing. One of the new developments is these new sheheds where they have smaller drones on top of the drone. And then they launched these other drones, which are then controlled by other people, and can attack very small targets, your apartment, your moving car, a very small area in the city. And so far, cities like Kiev and cities from the center of Ukraine westward have not been subject to these kinds of effective assassination tools. but they are going to be soon.

And all of which is to say that things are going to be very, very dangerous or very, very dark quickly. And I consider these conflicts totally, totally related, which is why we started the counteroffensive and we started Iran war dispatches to try to illustrate the two sides of the war. So what does the future look like for Ukraine then? I mean, it's bad enough that Europe now has to buy everything and it isn't just being sent from the United States, which it should be. Our security is European security, even if Americans don't understand that. But to not have the material to even sell it. And, I mean, it does seem pretty clear that Europe is really moving quickly to restart its own. defense industry.

Like, they are looking to stand up domestic production, especially in drone and counter drone stuff. But that does take a little bit of time. Like, you know, it takes 12, 24, 36 months to do those things. What is, I mean, what does the near-term future look like? Can Ukraine hold out for another year, two years? I mean, I don't mean to be so grim, but I just look at this stuff. It strikes me as, like, catastrophically bad.

It's bad. It's not catastrophically bad. Okay. Good. Talking off the ledge. I'm pulling you off the ledge, but I'm not telling you to get off. The same don't jump yet. I'm pulling off the ledge, but you can stay. I think the appropriate position is to continue to lean out the window. What I would say is I speak to Ukrainians every day. I have a large team of Ukrainians on my team.

And the idea of Ukrainians just deciding, okay, well, that was, you know, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, um, that, um, to, uh, trying to, uh, trying to keep our nation sovereign and our culture alive and our language alive. Um, we're, we're just going to stop that. I, I, I don't think that is, uh, what we're going to do. Basically, what this means is that the costs of continuing to resist Russian violence is just going to increase. There are going to be more missiles that go unanswered in the city. There's going to be more drones that blow up without intervention. And that is going to be very much just baked into the new facts of life. It's hard for me to describe to folks outside of Ukraine what it's like.

like to be inside Ukraine. But there is a keep calm and carry on sort of attitude where you just kind of get used to the idea of bombings in your city. Whereas at the beginning of the war, I would rush down to the basement every night and just sit there anxiously tapping on my phone and getting every piece of information about which drones were coming from which direction at the time it was in drones, but which troops were coming from which direction and which missiles were coming from where. Now you think yourself,

okay, well, it's five nights of attacks out of the last seven, and I just need to sleep. So I'm just going to pull my sleeping bag into the hallway and sleep on the floor and deal with it. And you just deal with it. Because what else is there to do,

but deal with it. So this is what, this is what, this is the way that that that whole that whole attitude develops that's a that's a hard way to live and well i i notice i notice one of your commenters saying i've never been very good at keeping calm and carrying on i but what i would say is you will find it in you um what uh we're we're I suspect darker days are ahead. I'm sorry to say. And our ability to adapt, our ability to be resilient is much greater than you might imagine it right now. You know, these times do call for a sort of courage within us that maybe we haven't tested yet, but it is something that we have within us. It is something that we have within us. And while you reside in the relative state, of the United States, it's time to take this moment to do whatever you can, to organize, to express your views towards your elected officials, to support humanitarian causes or other

causes that you think are worthy in order to push back while there is time to push back. Because the terrible and dangerous technologies that are we see in Iran and you can Ukraine, they are not going to be restricted just to those places. Drones are too cheap and too easy to use for that to happen. It is only a matter of time. It is only a matter of time until people who mean to do us harm manage to find ways to do that in the United States or to the United States. And so this is a very, it's a very, very rare, rare period for us to prepare to take very seriously. this rising tide of violence across the world, and not to think, you know, oh, well, it's just a regional conflict, or, you know, it's isolated over there. I very much worried that we're on this terrible pathway

in which it's going to come home to the United States very, very soon. We've seen hints of that already, and it's only a matter of time until it becomes a regular, reality. This is what it means to live in a multipolar world. And this is what the, these are the practical consequences of America's abdication of its role as the global hegemon. And I mean, I will never understand it. The extent to which America abdicated its position because like eggs got too expensive. Yeah. Like it's a, it seems like an absolutely crazy thing to me. I struggle to find historical analogs. When you see empires collapsing or civilizations collapsing, it's normally

because there's like an external threat. It's not often it's just decadence. Not often there's like the people insideers like, I'm bored of it, you know? That guy from the TV is funny. Let's make him president. But here we are. Tim, can you hit people up again on where they can find you? The counteroffensive is the substack being run about the Ukraine war, which you should all be subscribe to. It's been doing amazing work for years. But Tim and his colleagues have a brand new thing about the Iran War. Yes, that's right. You can find it at Iranwar. News. It's on substack as Iran War dispatches. Please do help us by subscribing for free today. We're doing a lot of stuff that is frankly dangerous and really very difficult to do, pulling out information from Iran.

We're about to, in the next, in a period of days, send one of our reporters into Iraq, into those border regions between Iraq and Iran. And that's going to be quite dangerous and something we need to be precise with. Your support would mean everything. And all that means right now is to go to aranward. com to hit subscribe.

That support would be quite meaningful. Yeah. Guys, do me a solid. Go over and sign up and support the, the amazing work they're doing. Sarah, Tim and I were talking about this this week. This has been like a very, very strange. You said it yourself when we started, Tim.

A very, very strange war to try to understand from the outside because, as you said, the reporting is so hard to get at because, frankly, because the United States government is no longer a trustworthy source of information. Like, you now have to assume the worst of the United States officials that you would from Iranian officials, you know, which is. Wow, that's something new. So we really do rely on media and especially independent media like what Tim is doing. So Iranwar dispatches, Iranwar dot news.

Iranwar. At Iranwar. News. Iranwar dot news at Iran war dispatches on Substack. And you'll find deep investigative reporting, human interest reporting, and really difficult information that we're pulling out of Iran right now. Yeah. Tim, thank you. much for taking the time to be with me. Stay safe, buddy. We'll talk again soon.

Everybody else, thank you for being with us. Good luck, America.