Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:39 - A Disastrous War

Episode Date: March 21, 2026

Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton interview Arta Moeini, Managing Director of the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, discussing the implications of recent Israeli strikes on Iranian gas facilities and the potential for Iranian retaliation. They critique America's flawed strategies that overestimate the ease of regime change in Iran and explore Tehran's shift to a more aggressive stance. The conversation addresses the muddled objectives of U.S. foreign policy, concerns about escalating conflicts, and domestic political ramifications, including Joe Kent's resignation. Emphasizing the need for a realist approach to align foreign policy with American interests, they conclude with a cautious outlook on the situation's complexities and the importance of ongoing dialogue. Chapters 0:38 Introduction and Context 1:56 Escalating Conflict in the Middle East 4:50 The U.S.-Israel Relationship Dynamics 8:02 The Role of Military Strategy 9:27 Iran's Response and Strategy 13:58 Proportionality and Deterrence 15:01 The Nature of Modern Warfare 19:11 The Perception of Iranian Power 24:24 Economic Implications of Sanctions 25:53 Asymmetrical Warfare and Technology 28:53 The American Political Landscape 33:49 Internal Conflicts and Administration Dynamics 40:17 Joe Kent's Resignation and Its Implications 48:06 The Israeli Strategy and Regional Dynamics 56:20 Potential Military Escalation 1:08:43 Nuclear Weapons and Strategic Considerations 1:13:22 The Future of Global Power Dynamics 1:14:15 Conclusion and Closing Remarks (Cleaned up w/ the Podsworth app. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podsworth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) Provoked show site: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://provoked.show⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Darryl's links: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@martyrmade⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://subscribe.martyrmade.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Scott's links: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@scotthortonshow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthortonacademy.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://libertarianinstitute.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://antiwar.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthorton.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthorton.org/books⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.scotthortonshow.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break humans. Negotiate now. End this war. You're watching Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton, debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present, and future. This is provoked. All right, you guys, it's provoked. All right.

So recording on Thursday night because I'm traveling. And actually we plan this poorly because I won't be traveling until Saturday morning. But anyway, we're recording on Thursday to play on Friday. It's provoked with the great me and especially him, Daryl Cooper, martyr made. And we have a very special guest, but I'm going to go ahead and let Daryl introduce him and take the interview from there. Go ahead, sir. Yeah, so this is somebody I've been excited to talk to for a long time. I followed him on Twitter for a very long time.

He's one of the best accounts on there when it comes to foreign affairs, especially stuff dealing with the Middle East and U.S. relations in the Middle East. But also, you know, you can find interviews and things. And he's been very helpful in, like, helping me keep track of sort of the broader issues, you know, ever since this war started, I tend to get, if I'm left to my own devices, kind of very focused on the technical military details. And so, you know, he's really been a huge help. thanks for coming on, brother.

It's great to finally talk to you. Thank you, Daryl. Thank you for having me. It's been a while that we had to do this. I'm glad that we finally made it happen, despite the entire America First Movement going down the drain. But we're going to find a way to hopefully keep it alive with these conversations. So, yeah.

Yeah, hopefully the next time we speak will be under better circumstances. But I guess I'll jump right into it. You know, Scott's had a long day, so I'll take the lead here. You know, the big news in the last 24 hours was that the Israelis hit the big natural gas field. Iranian side, the Iranian facilities on the big natural gas field they share with Qatar. And when I saw that news come through, two thoughts sort of immediately came to mind. The first was that Iran is definitely going to hit back at infrastructure in the Gulf states, which they did, which is something that the United States won't like. And the second thought I had right after that, though,

was that Iran would hit back at the infrastructure in the Gulf states, and that's something that Israel probably really will like. You know, these pampered monarchies in the Gulf, you know, they're saying what they have to say to stay on the good side of the United States and so forth. But, you know, these people are not like plain stupid. They're not whined. They understand that Israel and the United States

are the ones who have devastated their region for decades. and, you know, are the chief sources of instability, certainly in this particular instance. And so it seems to me that Israel probably knows that they know that. And if Israel is preparing for a future where the U.S. is not going to be this automatic on-call attack dog for them, you know, it seems to me they'd be perfectly happy to see the Arab countries reduced to chaos as well. And so by hitting Iranians hitting the Iranians hitting the Gulf infrastructure, are they kind of doing Israel's dirty work for them?

So I think we got to step back for a second and see sort of where we are. The American plan, to the extent that there was a plan, was to have basically 48 hours to 72 hours of conflict, decapitation, the regime capitulates, everything goes away, Donald Trump is a hero, and America has another Venezuela. that was the message, that was the story that was sold to the White House, especially by Benjamin Netanyahu and his backers who happened to be very close with the administration. That didn't work out. And we are now in the midst of a long, winded conflict in my view. It's going to be a conflict that is going to be drawn out. It's going to be attritional. It is,

it is an air campaign so far. And it has had a lot of tactical successes, but practical success. as you know, might usually, unless it's actually planned according to a coherent strategy, doesn't lead to strategic success or a strategic victory. In this case, we don't even know what the goal of the U.S. side ultimately was. I think we were sort of goaded into this conflict by Israel. And I think the Israeli end for this conflict is a kind of a state of affairs that is in no one's interest. It's not in America's interest, the Persian Gulf and the region's interest.

it's going to mean as they demonstrated, perhaps civil war within Iran. It will be, they basically have no red line when it comes to what they want in Iran. Regime change is a nice cover. There might be some diaspora folks that they can convince that this is what they want to do, but that's not really what is at stake here. The stake for Israelis is to eliminate any potential adversary or rival for their regional hegemon. So that's the goal. and yet they cannot achieve the goal

absent U.S. support and U.S. backing and not just financial that we have been doing or even with military supplies, they need the United States to take a lead in many of these operations. The United States is starting to waver

because Donald Trump knows that this is a very unpopular war. They also know that it's not going quite well for them. So there are, you know, rumors of, are we going to do this? Are we going to do that? There's two kind of considering options. I think it's almost inevitable that we will dabble down.

But if there's any president that can all of a sudden pivot, it would be Donald Trump because he can claim any defeat as a victory as well. But in terms of what the Israelis want is to try to find ways to get more of the region involved in the war, to close the off-ramps to the Iranians, that was what the killing of Ali Lari-Jani signified. He was probably one of the most sort of out-of-the-people. in charge at this moment, he was one of the most Western-oriented. He was a Kantian philosopher. He could speak to the Americans.

He would have found a way if it was possible. So eliminate that on the Iranian side to close that door, also then closed any kind of golden offer to Donald Trump by getting him to commit to more and more, more and more bad options, ultimately. And so the fact that you are escalating in the first place, if you are actually in a superior military position, So there is no question that the American and Israeli equipment and military doctrine

in a way more superior to the Iranians, right? So they do have the upper hand in terms of technology and equipment and weapon systems, and yet they are the ones that are escalating this. And the Iranians, after the first response to try to show that they are not designated, they have basically prepared for this kind of war for half a century. So they are looking this time for an attritional war. They know what they're doing. they're doing specific number of hits every day to Israel and to the Gulf,

but they're not going out of their way to shoot everything that they have in one Saaba. So the Israeli side then is escalating because it's frustrated and desperate. And so I think we should understand what that means. The side that escalates in a conflict like this is the one that is trying to get every side more involved in a conflict. And so we are fast and quite quickly moving up escalation ladder. And unfortunately, I think that Donald Trump is stuck in an escalation trap. So you can discuss what that means, but it is certainly not to the United States interest. It might tank his presidency and America's great power status.

So it's something that's really a big deal. This is not an excursion, as the president called it. It's definitely not an exfusion. And I guess we're going to get there, but Joe Kent's resignation doesn't come because he's against striking Iran through aerial campaign. He was an advocate for it. It comes, in my view, because the escalation ladder is getting us to positions

in which a kind of a ground force invasion and more and more a Vietnam scenario would be impossible to avoid. And I think seeing that and not, not being able to have any kind of consultation in to that decision-making process is getting Joe, but also others in the admin, to reconsider what their position is and to whether they want to resign heroically or try to sort of fill a position so that they prevent other new cons. But other, but you know, there is that kind of civil war within the administration that's also happening. And that's what a better in one sense. We actually have, you know,

if you are inclined to our America first or realist point of view, which I am, then we do have voices within the administration, but they're not being heard. So I think it is a very strange scenario or phenomenon that we are witnessing. So I'll stop there. That was just like kind of a broad view and we can focus on the... Yeah. I mean, in the past, whether after the strike on General Soleimani or last June, the Iranians were very much... They were obviously very carefully being almost exactly proportionate in their response to whatever actions we took.

I think, you know, at the end of the 12-day war when they launched the missiles at Qatar, I mean, it was very telegraphed. And I think, if I remember correctly, they launched the exact same number of missiles that we dropped bombs. Sort of a long-range, you know, nonverbal communication going on between, you know, the two sides. this time, it seems like Iran has a very different mentality. And this most recent hit on their natural gas facility, they did not respond proportionately. They escalated. They hit several more and did a lot more damage than they themselves took.

And, you know, I mean, it kind of, I think that, you know, if you want to establish deterrence, you have to sort of create a situation where the other side can, you know, you can't just respond proportionately forever because that gives the other side full initiative and allows them to sort of tailor their attacks on you to what they feel like they can handle at any given moment, right? And so that probably plays into what you're describing

as the escalation ladder. Maybe you can talk about that. Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, the special ladder is really being driven specifically by the U.S. and Israeli side, specifically the Israeli side, but it is true that the older leadership, the late Supreme Leader Homiday and the people who were close to them.

They were mostly in their 70s, they were kind of the first generation of the revolution stills. They had to become more and more cautious. They didn't want this war. They were very reluctant about this war because they need the cost of this war. And so again, let's have no illusions that this war is costing the Iranians, you know, the Iranians, their infrastructure, huge damages, and increasingly people will die. So it's not something that they walked into really nearly.

But at the same time, they realized that, you know, Israel, is precisely running a madman kind of campaign when it comes to war. It doesn't have any red lines. It acts as it pleases. It decapitates heads of states. I mean, this is a big deal. And you know, traditionally or conventionally, the idea of killing off heads of state is something that terrorists do, right?

Because they're non-state actors. States have this level of civility with one another, no matter what kind of ideology they had. I mean, we had at the height of the Cold War, it was unthinkable that either, I mean, Forget about the nuclear weapons per second. Just even the idea of eliminating the heads of state of another country. It's not something that was ever discussed.

During World War II, the same thing. Even attempts that were made, Hitler's life, were made by German opposition groups, not necessarily direct the campaign by America or Britain. So the idea that we are going to go and eliminate heads of state itself is something that's very out of, you know, outside of interest. relations. I think we should emphasize that. But that in itself shows that Israel acts in a very rogue way when it comes to international politics. It doesn't have red lines. It escalates. It goes to infrastructure. It hits civilians. It does whatever it wants. And it considers that as sort of an

unapologetic use of force, right? And it doesn't have any qualms or moralisms about that. It has moralism when somebody attacks them, but it doesn't have any sort of moralism when it comes to attacking others, which is very cynical. But that's what their view is. So, The Iranians during the 12-day war still were following this kind of like proportionality. And before that, for the past, you know, escalations from 23 onwards, there were rounds of this, as you know. And, you know, true promise one, true promise two, these are the various things for the operations that they use. They also had strategic patient. So, for example, when the Hamas leader was eliminated in Tehran, there was no immediate response from the Iranian, right?

This was an attack on sovereign Rarian territory, killing somebody that they had invited. But in any case, they didn't respond. And that was creating a lot of backlash within the Iranian decision-making structure, saying, why aren't we responding? These people will not back off. So that kept on going until we got to the 12-day war. But even during a 12-day war, first of all, Iran was entirely, I mean, it's very interesting to consider, right?

they had seen if Israel does this to their proxies. Hamas is not an Iranian proxy, but it does, but again, you could see that, it did that to Hezbollah, did that to other commanders in the field. And President Trump, you know, with Israeli support, had done that to Soleimani before. But Iran seems to have been entirely shocked and stunned by what happened. They were prepared for attacks and even a war with Israel, but they did not account for a decapitation strike on the first hours of the war. I'm talking about the 12-day war.

And so that in itself caught them by surprise. They had to sort of reorganize themselves and change their kind of command and control structures. But the regime is not just a one-person system. It is a deep total state. And so it had various levels of redundancy to be able to cope. But over the 12-day war,

they started to hit back, but still in a proportional way. And also, they were always worried about the United States joining the war. So they were trying to back channel, they were trying not to get America angry. Again, this kind of hesitancy existed. So what was the result of that?

I think immediately it created a perception of weakness in Washington and with Donald Trump. That was, I think, one of their most, Devanians' most severe mistakes. They thought that they were acting in a rational way, but then they did not appreciate the cognitive psychological impacts of war. And as you know, war,

half of war at least is a war of narratives, is a propaganda war. And so you go from the first accounts of the war where gruevo distances America from the war in the first hours to the first 24 hours when Donald Trump comes on and says, actually I did it,

Gregory was consulting and everything was great and I wanted to take credit for it. Why did that shift happen? Because there was this impression that Iran is weak, that the Israelis were right, that Iran was a paper tiger. That impression held all the way

till the resumption, and this is not a new war. This is the resumption of that war. That war had only paused. And, you know, I think we, those of us who follow international politics or Iran experts knew that this war was going to come back. And so that, that's what happened.

And this time around, the Iranians were prepared. They had a very different, more disaggregated, decentralized, defense doctrines, they were going to escalate as much as possible, you know, widen the war and horizontally escalate the war within the categories of escalation. So if you hit the Iranian energy, Iran is not going to hit a different unrelated sector, but it's going to hit that sector in various countries. That's the level of escalate. But even in this war, I think there's a degree of proportionality that's just ingrained to the Iranian doctrine, even if they're trying to act,

like a, like, you know, try to be mad. They can't do it. It's just a different, Iran as a state, and the civilizational state acts and has a different strategic doctrine than Israel does as a new state. So it's just, it's very hard to do that,

but at the same time, they're looking at long-term conflicts. So Iran thinks that if it goes into a war, now it has to sustain a war for months, if not years. That's the mentality. So they're trying to escalate proportionally within what they have and the means that they have, preparing for not just an acute conflict and confrontation,

but actually something that's going to be long-winded. So I think it's a different type of war. I think the United States didn't expect it. And that is why the Iranian response and the capacity to response was underestimated. And I think at this point we have to acknowledge that Iran was not a paper tiger, that Iran did have various capacities,

that Iran has been strengthened because of this war. not weakened, not even the same, strengthen. I'm choosing the words carefully. I think strategically, Iranian position in the Persian Gulf has become tantamount to that of a hegemon. There's no tactical scenario to change that. And all of these were Iranian advantages that it gets from strategic depth and geographic advantages that it wasn't really using prior to these conflicts.

It was willing to give Donald Trump a win because he didn't want this war. And now, because Israel, we have a situation in which Iran is actually benefiting, pushing and asking for better terms than it was two or three weeks ago. So I think it's a different circumstance. Again, this war is going to give pain to everyone. And the question becomes, who had a higher tolerance for pain, for maximum pain to experience, as well as who has better resilient and who has better wellpower

to continue to fight this war. And my argument as a realist, specifically as a cultural realist, someone who looks at the ontological aspects of wars and the cultural and geographic elements and the civilizational element and tries to combine those two lenses of analysis is ultimately Iran has thing power.

And this is an existential conflict for, yes, the Islamic Republic, but also Iran as a state. If you carefully follow what Israel has been doing to the region and what it has claimed to want to do to Iran

and also Turkey about the country is not just limited to Iran. So we are seeing this, and Iranians are acting as if just an existential conflict, which it is for them. So when countries actually have existential wars

that is threatening, them, as you see with Russia and Ukraine, they act very differently than something that's a war of choice. America is still kind of on defense. Donald Trump definitely is on defense. Even, you know, Israel is not going to put ground troops. It's relying on America to put its troops to fight it. But the fact that we are even, you know, if this was an actual conflict that was existential and part of our vital national interest, that wouldn't be a debate, right? Americans would sign up to go to war. would argue that, you know, the cartels in the South is something that's much more of a pressing concern to Americans than a war in the Middle East over oil that we don't even need because we're

energy independent. So just putting that in the context of American politics, I think it's important. It's not an existential conflict for us. It is an existential conflict for somebody else. And so that is going to impact decision-making. Yeah, that's very similar to, you know, the criticism that a lot of us had at the outbreak of the Ukraine war when we got started getting really, really involved in that is that this is a war of choice for us. It's not for Russia and you really probably shouldn't get yourself into fights where there's that much of an imbalance in terms of, you know, motivation. You just, you mentioned earlier that this is kind of becoming an attritional war. And, you know, maybe the sort of initial thought that somebody has when they hear that is like,

well, Iran can't possibly win that. I mean, we obviously have so much more in terms of resources and everything that Iran does. But, you know, the other side of that is that, you know, Iran has in a way, like a lot easier job to do than we do. You know, we have to inflict enough damage and enough pain, I guess, like if this is the goal to either crumble the society, which it seems very resilient so far, or to get them to tap out, which seems extremely unlikely. They, on the other hand, really just have to show, they have to come out of this and be able

to show that, look, you can take out 90% of our military capacity and we can still keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and the whole energy sector of this region shut down for 10 years if we want to. You know, because it doesn't take that much, you know, I mean, you don't have to shoot every tanker that tries to go through the Strait of Hormuz. You take out one a week, one a month, and you complicate the whole situation, you know. And also the Strait of Hormuz is not closed. I think that's a very important distinction. This is why I use the word control. right? It's one thing to say that the Iran has just been mad, they had no other option and they just threw a bunch of mines and just blew up the region. So close trafficking for everybody.

They didn't do that. They have basically they're, you know, they're basically having, using smart bombs through precision drones and other other types of selected, you know, attacks to give you safe passage if they want and not, if they don't want. So for example, China has been getting the oil that it wants, and India called the Iranians, and Modi negotiated for Indian vessels to also pass. So this is not a sort of a madman theory of closing down and shutting down all traffic is actually the kind of hegemonic or dominance doctrine, which Iran has proven that it basically owns the traffic there, and it can control it. And so if you are trouble, then you won't pass.

But if you work with the Iranians, then they will guarantee your passage. And that's what's giving them leverage. That's just on the straight-up-hormose question. And notice today in the news, Steve Whitkoff was giving an interview. I can't remember with who. And he was announcing that we're considering lifting sanctions on about 140 million barrels of Iranian oil that's currently floating in tankers on the sea right now.

And I guess the idea being that that's 10 or 12 days or so, supply that, you know, that's, that's supposed, I think it was marked for China that will, you know, we're using their oil, their own oil against them. We're going to allow this onto the market. That's going to keep oil prices down for, you know, maybe a week and a half, two weeks, and that's going to buy us some time to prosecute this war. And I guess I understand what he's saying, but I mean, we have sanctions on them for a reason, right? And the other side of that is they get what, I think, what physical oil is trading over in that region, right? right now, what, $20 billion for that oil or something?

And so, you know, I can be sure that if you were to go back at the beginning of this war, in the first day or two of this war, the plan was not to be lifting sanctions on Iranian oil 20 days into it. So, you know, it seems to me that that's sort of a, it wreaks a desperation. And by the way, this is what I'd rational mean. Exactly. In weeks of desperation, I mentioned that in a tweet, I think, yesterday. a couple days ago. But after the attack on the South Park gas fuel, which was, by the way,

shared gas tube in Qatar. And we had promised that there's no more attack on things that touched them after September. And yet this was another attack, and they got very angry at us. And that's part of the reason for Donald Trump's, you know, through social posts, all of a sudden denying any knowledge of an attack

that the entire admin was the saying in the morning that everyone knew about and it was supportive of. the president was supported. But that also goes to the way that we have to understand this war. This is not a conventional war between superpowers. We have F-35, what kind of

kind of, you know, Sukhojets do you have? Iran doesn't even have a very incredible airpower. So this is not that kind of a war. This is not a Cold War or a 20th century conflict. This is the perfect asymmetric

warfare campaign. It's like Vietnam 2.0. With with drone technology, strengthening the hand of the symmetrical power here, Iran, to actually have precision-guided munitions that perhaps the Vietnamese didn't have.

So it's allowing them offensive capability and capacity to tactically hurt the other side to go after the targets that they want to go after and actually have precision in doing so.

And now that with radar and with the interceptors both being depleted, they will have a better chance with lower number of launches to get higher penetration rates, and that's being proven by satellite imagery. So that's the tactical fight. So they do have that power, but ultimately the way that the Iranians are seeing this

is the pain threshold that we have to, you know, exact on the Americans, has to be outside of the battle of it. as well. So economic, energy, and the psychology of this war, really. So the straight-in-form moves is one, such data points. But then you have others, such as, you know, not just the energy, they can go after the salonation plants or electricity grid or infrastructure as well. That's what the precision munitions gives you. And also, they can escalate later on because, again, they haven't used their most sort of advanced generation, third, fourth generation missiles very much.

And they were waiting, because they have fewer of them, to have a recur air defense, let's say, in Israel and other places. So their first phase of the defense was to go after the region in terms of the Persian Gulf countries with the short-range ballistic missiles and a lot of drones, something that they didn't use even during the 12-day war. And they have tens of thousands of them, not in the thousands. So we have to see this in terms of what does that do economically? What does it do in terms of energy costs? What does it do to the paycheck of Americans? What does it do politically to Donald Trump? There is a midterm coming.

And they are actually considering this in a holistic account of what war means. And so that's the way that you measure paying. Now, there has been no air campaign ever in history that has successfully changed the regime or gotten them to capitulate. So they have history on their side, and there are what I call a middle power, a regional state, that has staying power as a civilizational, enduring civilizational state and power. And so it's able to leverage its social solidarity as well as its geography and strategic depth to be able to project power, or at least be resilient.

And so that has now shifted the strategic picture into Persian Gulf. I don't know how the United States moves away from this. And that's why I think there's a trap, because Donald Trump, no matter how he wants to spin this, it's very hard for him to say, we have gained anything out of this, other than to say we have killed on their leaders or decimated their Navy,

which is, that's not even necessarily true because they don't really have a Navy in the way that we have a Navy, or it's like saying we eliminated their Air Force. They don't really have an Air Force, a bunch of like F-Bords. Anyway, so, So the question then is, how do we change the strategic picture and the strategic gains of the Iranians? This war from the American side and from the president's side was about a few things.

Nuclear enrichment, which, by the way, it shouldn't be an issue. Iran has always insisted on having a sovereign nuclear enrichment. Nuclear enrichment does not mean nuclear weapons. But we have, because of push by the Israelis, we have changed our red line and the president has his own red line about nuclear weapons to include not just nuclear weapons, but any capacity for nuclear weapons down the line. So they are targeting all dual-use technology. And that's the way that you get into a position in which no deal is ever possible, because

everything could be dual-use. So then you're asking a country not to have any kind of technologies, and that's exactly what happened. After the nuclear enrichment red line, we got the missile technology red line, and missiles are their last deterrents. Imagine if Iran didn't have missiles and drones today. Well, then it had to capitulate, right? So it couldn't exact pain.

So any country would need to, any sovereign state, would need to have a defensive capability or retaliatory capability, at least an asymmetric one. And in the Iranian case, they have spent a lot of energy to try to endogenize that supply chain and that technology. So it's not something that they import. They do import some, you know, preliminary parts or some, you know, sodium percolate that could be used for,

solid fuels in the rockets, but which country doesn't do any importation. But they do have a domestic supply chain, something that we actually lack in America for many of the things that we do. And so Iran has been isolated because of our sanctions, but they have also tried to, this is a, this was a revolution about self-reliance. And so for all the costs that they have paid, and for all the draconian measures that they have put on their own people, they are also a deeply resilient and self-reliant state. And so I think that's something that even the Shah didn't have for the previous sort of monarchy in Iran.

Because Iran at the time had so many beautiful gadgets that Donald Trump likes to say big, beautiful American, the best top of the line. But it was all dependent on American support and logistics. So as soon as the Shah was toppled, Iran couldn't use most of them during the Iranian-Iraq war. That Iran-Iraq war both strengthened the regime. That's why I have been saying for months

that when this war happens, there's not like a Republican will get strengthened. Part of that is just the rallying factor against foreign enemy. For any political state, if there was an invasion in America, what would we do? We would sort of come together, even if it's Biden as president. It doesn't matter who is the president.

Or if you're anti-Trump, you would still come and support the U.S. government because it's an invasion. That's a normal human reaction to your community. But in this case, It wasn't just that. It was also that their entire perception, the entire rationale of the revolution was about sovereignty.

In a way, the Iranian revolution united the left and the right elements at the time, and then it was almost one at the end. But all of them had agreed on one thing, and that's that Iranian sovereignty should be ironclad. 50 years before, we were talking about sovereignty in the way that we are. So it was a populist sovereign to this revolution, and it had religious elements. I mean, hello, think about our own situation today.

We have many of the same sort of, you know, tropes in our own kind of society. Because when we feel like we are powerless, we want to talk more about sovereignty. So the Iranians did the last great revolution of the 20th century, and that was all about sovereignty and self-reliance. Every time the focus moves away from the foreign affairs and international pressures and enmities and wars, they have serious problems because it's very hard to manage the Iranian society, half of which, more than half of which is very liberal and westernized. So they have serious issues there, but then as soon as there is a war, as soon as there is international pressure, that works to the benefit of the system in Iran.

And so I just saw a repeat of this happening, and I couldn't even see how the United States changes that picture other than then dabbling down at every turn because it cannot fathom. How do you destroy any target that you want? Kill anyone that you want and whip and yet you can't get any wins strategically. That disconnect is something that's very hard, specifically for Donald Trump, who is a very personalistic person and is trying to figure out who is running Iran. Nobody is running around. It's like saying who runs the Soviet Union or who runs China.

Yes, there is, you know, President Xi. But China would survive the absence of Xi. That's what these modern total states are. By the way, America is a modern total state. That's what is a state if not a modern total state. So if President Trump is eliminated, the government continues. If most of the cabinet are eliminated, God forbid, government continues. Those are that kind of resilience is baked in to modern total state.

That's what the Leviathan of modern state is. Now, it's very different from the sultanates of the Persian Gulf or Venezuela even or these other countries that don't have the tradition of statehood and its modernization over decades and centuries. Again, you can't get a modern total state over a decade or two. You need to have long-term actions that sort of do that for you. And the modern total state in Iran is not a creation of the development. Republic is a long-term development that has happened since the Iranian confrontation with

modernity back in the 19th century. So every kind of premier, whether it was monarchy or even the monarchs, and then the Ayatollah doesn't matter what the political system has modernized the political state and use it as leverage for whatever it is that they wanted to do. That's the difference that I think needs to be understood. Hey, I want to jump in here for a second. I interviewed Joe Kent today. Beautiful. I think I got the second published interview of him. Obviously, Tucker got the first one.

I'm interested in hearing you guys discuss him and or more importantly what all you think, his defection from the government represents, what difference you think it'll make, you know, politically and that kind of thing. Let Artigal. I think Joe is a hero for doing what he did. I don't know him personally.

I know him through our brain tenses. but it's, you know, everyone who talks about him, talks about him as man of principle and utmost integrity. I think we see this in the letter. We see this in the way that he resigned. I think that my view is that he resigned because he knows, as the former director now of the National Counterterrorism Center, has access or had access to the highest level of insult

to know what might be coming down the road. And he wanted to distance himself from that. I think some of the options that this administration might consider for the sake of Israel and for the sake of saving face at this point, it's truly atroaches. It's not going to make America safer. It's going to evaporate American credibility, American moral standing. I mean, I'm a realist. I don't bring any moralism into my analysis, but if that's your thing, also you're in trouble.

And ultimately, it's not going to change anything other than create a lot of this. misery for a lot of people, including many American families, not just the ones that are going to be paying higher gas prices and, you know, higher prices for consumer goods and food and everything else, but also bodies, American bodies might be coming home again at a large level if we start committing ground troops. And also then there's a sort of what the nuclear scenario of all this would be, which we can discuss later, but I think that's a big deal as well. but I think this sends a signal that there are people in the administration, first of all, that are unhappy, and he's opening the door for them to also have the courage to leave.

That's why they're coming after, and they're trying to criminalize what he did. That should worry and concern all of us. The FBI, I mean, what is it doing? What happened to Toronto v. Kirk? Why don't we actually figure that out? First, before we go after, you know, an American. hero who has deported 11 times in Iraq war and actually true to the rule of war on terror and actually has been defending the president and his previous kinetic actions in Iran

and he has fought the Iranian and the Iranian proxy for years. So I think his record is unimpeachable on this and it should raise concerns about that. It also shows that America first is no longer beholden to Trump. I think America First needs to understand that it is something bigger than Donald Trump, that America First actually, as we know from history, it comes from a long time before Trump was even alive. So America First is a common sense strategy for putting American interests first and doing things that are in their national interest, period, and doing certain things when even the

administration itself, today Ratcliffe said so, Rubio said so the first day, we did this because of Israel or Israel has interest that is not our interest. These kinds of messaging from the administration itself is clearly signaling that we are there for Israel. This is not an anti-Semitic trope. Israel is not every Jewish person in America and most of many of the Jews here in America, American Jews are against the war. So I think this is the kind of cynical attempts to try to silence any dissent about this war.

and I think by putting himself out there, Joe Kent has allowed for others to come out. Now, I also want to say something in terms of other restrained friends in the admin who would choose not to resign. I think that's also a respectable position because they are deeply worried about if they resign, who else is going to come and replace their position?

Maybe someone with more either manufacturing intel if they are in a position that they can do so. like close to Gabbard's position, maybe they would actually push the most draconian, the most devastating tactics and operational ideas to the president. Again, this is a personal choice.

I understand those who resign. I understand those who don't, but it just shows that America first itself is anyone that can claim to actually be America first and not make it into a cult of personality can clearly see that this war on Iran is not in America's interest and therefore he's not America first. I got a call from a friend, Iraq War Combat Vett guy, Army, who knows Joe Kent fairly well,

and right after Joe issued his letter. And he called me very worried. And the reason he was worried, and he said, you got to understand who Joe Kent is. Like, this guy's never quit anything in his life. And for him to do this, he's to say, to. speak to what you just said. He said, the only reason, he said, I, he didn't talk to him about this or anything, but like the only reason he could think of is that we're about to do something really, really stupid that he just can't be a part of. It's the only thing he could think of. And so, you know, when I step back and just sort of look at where we're at right now, this 48-hour war that we're three weeks into, it seems like the administration has accepted on some level that

Iranian regime change is probably not something that can be accomplished within an acceptable time frame for us, just due to the effects on the global economy, the fact that we're already drawing down troops and weapon systems and munitions from other critical theaters like the Asia Pacific. And as you said, too, of course, the midterms are coming up, you know? The new Ayatollah does not have an election in November he has to worry about. And so, you know, and I think even if Trump doesn't care what happens in the midterms, a lot of Republicans do. And so there's some pressure that's there. The Israelis, you know, they might think there's been some indications that they seem to think regime change is unlikely at this point, too. But as we talked about at the beginning,

they keep taking steps that are clearly designed to take away our off-rams and to keep this thing going as long as possible and to escalate it and bring in as many other parties as possible, right? very similar, I guess, to, you know, in a way to when we took out Nord Stream 2, the sort of cut off the possibility of Germany maybe looking for, you know, a route to peace with Russia in Ukraine. So there's all these reasons that, you know, it looks like this can't possibly go on forever, you know, the economy, the politics, the diplomatic price, all that. And yet it seems impossible for Trump or Netanyahu to really take an off ramp that would give in to Iran's. primary demand, which is, you know, they talk about reparations and all those kind of things. Those sound to me like demands that are meant to be climbed down from, but I cannot see how Iran can back down from their primary demand of getting some kind of enforceable guarantee that this is

not going to happen again. And if we were to give into that, not even Trump could talk his way around this being anything other than a total disaster, like a real military defeat. And it's impossible for me to imagine his ego allowing him to do that. And so, you know, and it's almost impossible to imagine the Iranians accepting anything less because, you know, as you said, they've taken a huge amount of damage and they know that we can retool a hell of a lot faster than they can. And so if we come back for around three and nine months, they're going to be in a much weaker position than they're in right now. And so the rational choice is to die on this hill, you know, fight it out right now. That's,

that's clearly, I think, the rational choice for the Iranian. But given our force structure and our defense industrial capacity and the midterms and the economic and diplomatic problems, all these things that indicated can't go on forever, you know, you counter that with what I just said. Like, what do you think are the chances that we will find a way out of this or that one side somehow beats the other into submission, you know, by the end of the month, by the summer, by the end of the year? I mean, where do you see this going? I mean, that's a great question. It's very hard to read the tea leaves on that. I just think that at this point, just putting aside, I think we all need this war to end,

it doesn't serve anybody, especially no American. But I just putting the sort of objective lens on, I just don't see how we're going to extricate ourselves from this. I think we're going to see a deep, ever-expanding quagmire. And I think that those are the kind of poised. So, again, Donald Trump, I think, to his credit, realized in the first 24 to 48 hours, it's not going to way that they thought that it was going to go, that they have actually given a lot of spiritual fuel, as I wrote in an article for unheard,

by martyering this guy who, that was what he would demand, he would want, he was craved, and that really supercharged its followers. The liberal Iranian, especially in diaspora, were celebrating on the street and opening champagne, models, but then in Iran, there was just kind of like, you know, he had, there was all this symbolism about how he died in this like holy month of Ramadan and like, you know, he looked like the symbolic sort of heads of Shiism, the first and the third emom, you know, basically being martyred. And so that's psychology of martyrdom and dying, standing up and resistance. Really, I think, translated.

So I think in a way his death was the greatest gift that he could, even, the regime more than his 37 years in charge and the greatest gift that we could give the regime. So that's why, I mean, these, some of these things, I mean, it's just it's so easy to think from our sort of Hollywood lens. We're going to eliminate the guy and everything's going to go and that's not how it works in most of these other cultural domain. But yeah, go ahead, Scott. Yeah, I think you just answered this, but I was going to say, so then what are the chances then of the daydreams? Because after all, America does have lot of money and the Israelis do when we hand it to them to also spend.

So what are the chances that, and I know the way things are now, it doesn't seem like these groups are taking us up on or whatever, but let's say we keep really bombing regime leaders, middle managers and lower and lower down the chain as much as we can, and then they start pouring money into groups like P. Jack, M.E.K., the monarchist mercenaries, maybe Jandala suicide bombers, Azeri separatists of whatever description or Sunni Arabs from the Southwest. Is it completely crazy to think

that the West using those levers could actually go ahead and combine with a massive air campaign, tear Iran apart and into a massive civil war? That was the Israeli plan in my view, but it obviously failed. So the Israeli plan was to create this entire sort of account or narrative about the war that the Iranian regime is illegitimate, you know, telling or promising people that there will be regime change,

that, you know, we're going to bomb everybody and then you're going to come to the street and take charge. And at the same time, the Mossad was paying these Sassanish groups in Eastern Iraq and, you know, Western Iran, the Iranian courts, which many of these groups work as you know very well with the with the Israelis as well as the Americans not so much to Azarees because the if you think about it both the supreme leader and the president are Azeri Iranians so the Azeris had no interest in this and they also because of Turkey and Turkey's pull with Azerbaijan they kind of thought this as a problem they didn't want to spill over they didn't want this kind of this level of regime change you don't know they're not

regime chase. So Azerbaijan know, but Kortisand was certainly what they wanted to do. And the MECA, which is the tools that they use all the time. MECA, it's called the Mojahedin Cal, which is the people's Mojahedin, is a combination of Islamism with Marxism. It's like the worst thing that you want to imagine. It's a cult. It's only supported by the most notorious characters in Washington, D.C., Woody Giuliani and Pompeo are their lobbyists. But again, And they are just tactical units. They are used in, you know, Mossad uses them inside Iran. They are the group that actually originally sort of revealed the plans that Iran has a nuclear program

or nuclear technology infrastructure. And that's how this whole entire nuclear file got going open. They worked, again, very close. They used to work with the Saddam regime, with the bathists and Iraqis during the 80s to fight against the Iranians. So again, these are very like unpatriotic tools of foreign entities. And so they had that. And then the Israelis basically turned the Pahlaviists,

the sort of the people who support, I don't like the term monarchy as them, because it's really Pahlavi is basically using his personal sort of connection as the personal, the fact that he's well known as the former Crown Prince, he's using that credibility to then justify and rationalize Israeli actions in Iran. And that's, you know, putting him in MECA, territory for many Iranians, especially inside Iran.

And now the war had actually come. So it's no longer this kind of like conspiracy theory that Vazapalavis was in on it with the Israelis. So the idea was to get urban warfare to getting the liberal Iranians out in the streets with Mossad support and then also attacked Iranian borders to Kurdish groups. That has not transpired for better or for wars in terms of their Israeli strategy. The Americans didn't want, we really didn't want this. The White House didn't want this as much.

Because the goal, I don't think, was regime change. Trump was happy to say, fine, you know, if you want to collapse the regime, it's fine. But he never supported with a validity. I think that's important to note. And the idea of state collapse, because in Iran, you're not going to get regime change. You're either going to get state collapse, serialization, civil war, and refugee flows, and a failed state of that, I mean, for this to happen, this is the level. and the IRGC will do long time fighting insurgency

until it sort of reestabishes control. You get something like this so that Israel can continue to come in and find out where everything is and blow it up what they did to Syria. That's the Israeli goal. America doesn't have that interest because America still understands

that these huge states. We can't have state. America didn't even want state failure in Syria, let alone. So America didn't ultimately, like the Trump administration, didn't want the Syrianized situation in Syria, but not only Iran.

So that's why they worked with the Turks and the Saudis and Tom Barra to try to stabilize the situation after Ahmad al-Shara got to power. But that was effectively a change from the Russian-Iranian cline to the Turkish client. But that's not going to be so easily achieved in Iran. The American position, though, to go back to the off-ram,

again, Donald Trump realized that this is not going to plan, So immediately tried to reach out to the Iranians and say, let's have another ceasefire immediately. But the Iranians, I think to their rational credit and also to what Donaldson, realized, oh well, that if they accept the ceasefire, they have just absorbed the costs for no benefit. And this is the war that they want to finish this. They want the shadow of war. Look, the revolution happened in 79. Ever since then, I think one can easily make the case that Iran has been under a shadow,

war. Both because of them, I mean, the rhetoric of Iran has been hostile to the West. I don't think anyone denies that. And Iran has had proxies and the proxies have been a threat to the American soldiers in the region. But from an Iranian perspective, this is our part of the world and the Americans are interjecting an America. And Israel is an American outpost.

So they are trying to get America to leave, but also America from the very beginning said, no. And we're going to be threatening war. with the Islamic Republic or Iran and sanctioned them, and that's a form of economic war, and do maximum pressure and maximum pain to get what we want. And the Iranians have prepared for this for 47 years, and now the war has finally came.

And so they're prepared for this war. They know that it has to be an attritional war and go long enough or the other side to really lose interest in fighting it. And that might mean months, it might mean years. And it's for this reason that I'm very, very, So again, I don't think the Iranian side was willing, especially the IRGC, the more securitized, you know, the hardened Islamic Republic is ready to do any kind of negotiations until it gets to the point that it knows. It has more demands than it did before.

It wants acknowledgement of nuclear enrichment rights. It wants missile defense and makes missile capability with no limits. It wants to continue it. It will have the continuous control over the Strait of Hormuzet that I think from this point on it will be irreversible. in the Iranian file, and ultimately it wants to find a way to both revitalize the economy and do rebuilding, but also not be subject to constant threats and basically know that the war with the U.S. has ended. So they want a kind of a non-aggression pact with America, and I think they'll be even happy to

have it with Israel. That's the level of non-aggression pact that they will be looking at. But they were not going to give up any of those things that has caused these wars from the Israeli perspective. So I think from the Israeli angle, they have every interest in trying to escalate this to get the region involved. Right before we got to the show,

I saw this report from the Iranians, from the IRGC spokesman who was saying that there is reports that we hit Aramco in Saudi Arabia. We want to say that we are very open about where we hit and we have hit all these refineries, but we haven't hit Aramco, and that's designed to get Saudi Arabia onto the war with,

And basically they call it the Zionist plot. So they keep saying that some of these attacks are also done to the Israelis to get the region to join on the Israeli side. Now, the Iranian is no, this is very unpopular on Arab street, you know, even if the Arab governments want to join. It's very unpopular because it's a very strange circumstance because the majority of the Arab population, the region, is pro-Iran in the Islamic Republic. Their governments are in. But then even though the government is increasingly getting domestic and social support, and it does have a base of support, 30% or so, that's very committed and willing to die for the cause, it does have a problem with many Iranians, a majority of Iranians, that find the Islamic Republic illegitimate from their perspective.

So it's a circumstance in which a lot of secular liberal Iranians don't understand why Iran does the things that it does and why it wants to fight Israel and they see it as an Iranian problem. But then the Arab streets actually see Iran as a liberator and the only state that's standing up to the sort of Western imperialism. So they are all on the Iranian agenda. So it makes it very complicated.

But ultimately, because the Israelis want America to be deadling down, America is kind of looking at the options of what that would look like. It wouldn't look like a ground invasion at the level of Iraq. I don't believe that will happen. But I think what's being considered is sort of littoral and limited combat units,

special forces, you know, 82nd airborne, amphibious operations to try to secure a certain things. That could be securing the Park Island, where Iran exports most of its oil. It could be securing other disputed islands that, you know, the Iranians used to control the Persian Gulf. it could be, or both of them could be false fights for an American operation into deepening to Iranian territory to recover the 400 kilograms of 60% in rich uranium, which you don't know where it is.

I don't think Americans also know where it is. I mean, that sounds like a suicide mission. So again, whichever aspects of this we focus on, there will be, I mean, these troops as excellent as they are in combat. And I don't think any country has better special forces. It will be, we'll be setting targets. And if they're in these islands or in these nuclear underground bunkers, you know, they will be basically just pounded.

And Iran had actually expected that it wants this. Why? Because Iran said, it's very hard for us to kill Americans and raise the cost, and based on the cost question that we were talking about earlier. But so the American exposure is low. So, America is not, well, Israel and America are now deliberately increasing if this goes through American exposure to Iranian ground forces. Again, Iran has a 2 million people ground force, at least 250,000 IRGC ground forces.

These people are not doing anything, basically, during this war. And they can be deployed at any place. Even the threat that Scott mentioned about the Iraqis rising up and taking cities, which was something that was considered by the administration, as you know, is something that the Iranians, you know, were ready, you know, they were ready to go in and actually take the war to Iraqi Kurdistan. And that's why Marzani and the Talibani, the two basically family heads of the courts in Iraq, the Iraqi courts with the Iraqi army and the Shiite mobilized units basically created the buffer zone on Iran's behalf to prevent

the Iranian courts from doing anything to Iran because they knew that the Iranian IRC was going to come in. Already, one of the hardest hit places is Erbil, is the American base, which basically is the common for a lot of Mosadd and Israeli operation in the region. Iran has made it clear that places like Erbil, places like, you know, like in Kuwait, all of these places that were used to see into Iranian territory and see where these missile factories are and where the launches are, a lot of that is, you know, they have made it clear. They're not going to allow for any of that to come back. And the Iranians, they do have a lot of patience. They have made their name in strategic patience. But if you think about what they did with Iraq, after Iraq, they vowed that they will make

sure that Iraq will never threaten them again. And so once Saddam Hussein was removed, Iran has made Iraq part of its strategic picture. So there's no threat from Iraq to Iran. If Saddam was still in the picture, this would have been a very different war, for example. So this is the kind of, so the Iranians understood where the vulnerability was and they've completely neutralized it and actually have gained strategically

from the GWAT wars and endless wars in the Middle East. It's served in a way Iran and Israel. And this is a very strange scenario. Israel does certain things that it's all for itself but also helps the Islamic Republic in retrospect. And I think it's because they are very,

They want to create this sort of like us versus them and just extend as much as possible. But it doesn't make any sense from an American perspective, right? And I think everyone should agree on that point. You know, even if you are against the Islamic Republic, I think you should be, you know, you can see that the Islamic Republic did become stronger during the wars in the Middle East. That happened on behalf of Netanyahu ultimately. I still don't know why we attacked Iraq from the, from the Iraq. national perspective, but it made a lot of sense based on the project clean break and what

Netanyahu's view of the world is. And that's a very different view. I mean, I sometimes say as a joke, my view is very much close to the IDF in the 80s. I think there is ultimately a deep relationship to be made between Israel and the real estate and Iran of the real estate. And that's what the, at the height of the revolution, at the height of the rhetoric, at the height of we are going to eliminate and, you know, Israel and go to, you know, Jerusalem. Israelis were supporting Iran through Iran-Contraper to fight the Iraqis.

That's based on the periphery strategy that they had. It was Netanyarush Haran, but also It's Haram, who started shifting from this after the Cold War. And that really put us in a very different strategic environment. I think that is a very nonsensical, unrealistic posture from the Israelis. So, you know, the Israelis that I talk to, I see that if they're older, if they remember the 80s, I think they tend to agree with what I'm saying. And it's, you know, it's a more sort of neo-Zionist Israelis who don't, who are really threatening the longevity of Israel. And this is what the more sort of security-oriented, realist Israelis understood. You know, there's no, ultimately Iran is not going to invade Israel and Israel is not going to invade Iran.

They don't, there are thousands of miles apart. And, you know, they can actually use, you know, their relationship to make sure that their other rivals or adversaries don't get powerful enough and balance other countries. And that's, I mean, again, I think the logic of power and power balancing as a realist triumphs over or trumps this kind of ideological posturing. But yet, we're having groups in America and we're having groups in Israel today. and promoted by Netanyahu for his own kind of neocon ideological posture. But they are effectively apocalyptic and engage in eschatological psychosis, and it's very divorced from the reality of power and what that means. So I see the scenario as Israel still wants America to fight this war,

I think it will be ultimately successful in getting Trump to devil them, because the Iranians also don't want it, and they have eliminated, they will continue to eliminate anyone in Iran that would be Western-oriented and allow for Iran to be more hawkish so that, you know, hawkish elements in America, hawkish elements in Iran, and the war flow escalate. This is what they did with Hamas. You know, Natarayahu supported Hamas, funded Hamas. Why? Because you want that a Manichian view of the world to really get its place and do the kinds of create the kind of environment that you think you can capitalize on. I just don't see how Israel ultimately in 10 years will have capitalized on this.

But again, because they have a very, they overestimate their own power, but underestimate the power of regional states. That's specifically Turkey, Egypt, and Iran. It's very different what Israel can do to Lebanon, Gaza, Syria. But even in Gaza, they haven't been able to eliminate all of the Hamas leadership after all of this, you know, draconian, reckless, devastating bombing. So I don't see how they're, going to do this to a country that that is, you know, three times, you know, a piece of

Western Europe or three times the size of Germany. So it's a very different kind of environment. But this all raises, I want to raise this. There is another scenario other than the ground warfare is, well, we are not getting what we want. And imagine the, what we do with the ground forces, the special office, which is probably going to be the next step of the ladder, that's going to fail and Americans die. What are we going to do? We're not going to go put 100,000 troops deploy them to go and conquer specific parts of Iran or even go to march to Tehran.

So what's the next step? Either we have to step away from the escalation ladder, or I think the Israelis are going to pressure us into something that's very, very dangerous. And I think that is tactical nuclear weapons. I don't use that lightly. I hate fear mongering, but I do think that not because Iran is pounding Israel even, but because there is this impression that this nuclear bombardment works in Japan, and therefore that might work on Iran and get them to finally capitulate.

Well, this didn't work in Japan. Japan actually surrendered because of the ground forces of the Soviet Union, and it was going to do this anyway. Truman was actually doing this to show the might of the American power, and he was able to use it because it was the only nuclear state at the time. So the devastation aside, the moral crisis aside, and the question of whether or not the Israelis have the railroad to do that themselves or actually are going to throw this on us as well.

I think we need to have huge red lines starting now as to what is it that America is going to do to prevent the hands. of Israelis either to use tactical nuclear weapons themselves or force us to do it in the hope or the illusion or delusion that some sort of a nuclear attack on Iran is going to change the trajectory of this way and get the Iranians and capitulation. They're not going to capitulation even after a nuclear attack.

You're only going to get all the reasons that they want to pound Israel back with whatever conventional force that they have. And they already will kind of consider moving towards a nuclear weapon because of the fact of, you know, this is probably the only way that they can establish deterrence because they think that the American side is now being irrational. And so we need to really think about why we are here. I don't believe in the conspiracy theories of, you know,

they have something on the president or whatnot. I think it's easier question than that. And again, I will be, if someone can show me some evidence of how the Israelis kind of like manipulate us, I think I'll love to see it. But I actually think of a different scenario. I think Israel is the only country that has nuclear monopoly in the region. It wants to prevent nuclear parity by any other country, no matter whatever cost and whatever red lines. And it will try to protect this as long as possible.

But it's using that, and it has used that since first 67, but really since 1973, on Nixon, to try to basically, what I call nuclear blackmail us, into doing what they want. And so if you consider the 12-day war, we went into the 12-day war by trying to say, well, okay, Israel has this war. It's all about nuclear weapons again, but we are going to run for their defense. We're going to cover them.

And from our perspective, we're the defensive war, we're also going to sort of sweeten the deal because they're so worried by actually eliminating, obliterating, as the president said, the Iranian nuclear capacities and facilities and use B-2s and do it, operation with an hammer.

Okay, well, what was actually revealed by that war is that Iran has all these missile cities, and we only know half of it, if even that, and that they can outlast and continue to pound Israel, and Israel is quite small. So then the Israeli question became not only the nuclear material and the dual-use technology in Iran and eliminating any capacity in Iran for nuclear industry or nuclear technology, but also eliminating any kind of missile, medium to long-range missile system that Iran might use to exact pain on Israel or at least have a second strike capability. And that is why I think we went back in this time around. And I think Donald Trump might have been, you know, if Nixon, with all of his realism and all of his rational thinking,

I think the greatest foreign policy thinker that we have had in the post-war era, If he was forced and he and Kistinger were forced to go to Israel's defense conventionally in 73, it's all like Donald Trump could easily be told that, well, we're going to start this, we're going to go to war. Let's say Iran doesn't attack America. There's no imminent threat in that regard. And this take-for-attack continues. Well, at some point, you're going to escalate to a level in which Israel is going to use nuclear weapons. So that threats of nuclear weapons against Iran might be this actual pull that brings America into the war.

in the first place and this time in an offensive capacity, well, let's eliminate that threat to the Israelis, you know, don't actually use nuclear weapons. But the quagmire effects of this war, the strategic disaster that this war has caused for the administration, would actually make that more likely, which is why previous presidents basically told that he had to get lost.

And so, including in the Bush administration, right? I mean, so this is like, we're in the territory in which the American neocon didn't, wouldn't consider. And I think this is the first time in my lifetime. I've been a critic of the Iraq War from the very beginning that has been very poor method in my experience. But it's the first time that I think the realist anti-establishment voices,

as well as the establishment, your sort of liberal internationalists, your neocomps, David Petritus, and even Bill Crystal and Kagan are all on board in a sense that this is a bad war. Why? Well, because strategically, it doesn't advance any of our interests. Actually, it's empowering the Iranians. It is having far-reaching systemic effects around the world in China, in Russia.

It's actually creating the Eurasian axis that we kept climbing has been created against. So you're actually kind of forcing them into this kind of alliance, even though they are very different and they don't want to have that alliance. And so ultimately then, we are in this position in which this might escalate into this kind of a nuclear exchange, the first since 1945. And I think that is a death blow to American credibility,

to American power. I think it's going to fundamentally reshape the world. But even if that doesn't happen, I think we are, the,

we have to consider the systemic effects of America's power and its decline. America was in a unipolar moment. That's why we have all these bases

in the Middle East in the first place. They all happened in the 90s after the first, the Persian Gulf War, right? So we ended up surrounding and encircling the Middle East and Iran in the 90s to supposedly allegedly provide protection and make sure the free flow of oil. But ultimately, the Iraq war, the war on terror, our endless wars in the Middle East, and the

financial crisis eroded our power to the point that we are no longer seeing signs that the unipolar moment has ended. I think that the first sort of siren call of that was the Russian war in Ukraine and the fact that we kind of expanded NATO to get this war and that was a disaster. But we are not seeing the full picture until the Iran war. I think the Iran war will be remembered as the culmination of the rupture. And we are, and everyone would clearly see what we are talking about, as theorists, when we were talking about the end of the unipolar moment,

that we are then in a post-unipolar era where all of the post-war rules of the rules-based system, but also the very conception of the globe, as we consider, is ending. And we're not moving towards another kind of great power competition between us and China, but actually a different arrangement of the world in various regions, in which regional powers will have much more, much more endurance and much more resilience and much more say

as to what's going to happen in their near Republic. And I think that's something that only, again, modern president that to kind of recognize that with Nixon. We have to really, I think, bring back the Nixon doctrine to be able to continue to be a great power in this era. But the culmination of the rupture and the end of American primacy, global primacy, global hegemony, the illusion of global hegemony itself.

I think those will be the lessons of this war. And I just hope that we realize that before, we commit thousands of lives and trillions of dollars to a cause which will only make it more painful and maybe will threaten our own great power status as, you know, as a regional hemispheric power, which is basically what Donald Trump and, you know, the people who wrote the national security strategy, the Donald Road doctrine wanted, right? So this is, this goes against all of the logic. And I think there is a, again, I think realism is not pacifism. So there is a logic to what that document was trying to do.

And recall what it says. It says the Middle East is perfect, is peaceful, we have no business there. It is right. We have destroyed that peace and that stability and we have done it over years and decades for the stake of Israel, but also because we have misunderstood

the role of regional powers. And those regional powers are no longer going to be bullied and intimidated by our conventional military might, I would stop there. Well, as we move toward what seems inevitably a rebalancing of power in the world, first we've got to make it through this gauntlet, as you said, without dragging ourselves into a catastrophe we're not going to recover from. So I think we'll go ahead and let you get out of here. Man, I really appreciate your time.

I'd love to have you on more as this if, you know, hopefully this thing ends tomorrow. But as this goes on, this has been super useful for me as your stuff always is. Scott, you got anything? No, just gratitude. It was really interesting hearing you go over this stuff from your perspective here. I learned a lot. So thank you very much for joining us. Where can people find you, bro?

My Twitter, I'm sure you guys are going to put all the information, but my ex-account, At Artramoini, you can see the name on the bottom of the screen. So they can find that at Artramarini. There's also the website that we have for our institute. The Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, the website is Peace Diplomacy. or just peace diplomacy.org. And that's where we have our more sort of strategic analysis, a realist perspective.

We are the only, I think, fundamentally realist think tank in Washington, D.C. We refuse to go on a moralistic direction. And I think that's something that is important for our policy because it's very America first in that regard. And ultimately, Agon. Agon is a little more highbrow intellectual magazine. that focuses on radical realism, a very niche perspective on world affairs,

and not just foreign affairs. A lot of my work, I'm an international political theorist, a lot of my work focuses on modernity and the various crises of modern liberal order as well as other faces of modernity as a paradigm. And so I think to see that in that way, I think is the goal of Agon. And so I think a lot of your listeners,

especially Darrow, the listeners might appreciate the work that Agon. Yeah, that kind of stuff is actually why I really started following you in the first place. So I hope this war ends so that you can kind of get back to focusing on more. Exactly. I hope so too. But yeah, it's agonmag.com. www.

www.agongmag.com. By the way, my listeners are a lot more highbrow than me, so don't count them out. Well, of course. No, I'm just saying in terms of, I know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just, yeah, I know. It wasn't.

Okay. Thanks, of course. I'll be happy to collaborate for there and talk any time you guys. Thanks, brother. This was a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, Cooper. That was a good one, man. Yeah, I love those. I love those ones where all I have to do is kind of throw out a little red meat and he'll just take over and run with it for a while. Those were the easy ones. That must be a lot of like what it's like to interview me, I think.

All right, well, I've had it. You're my eighth interview of the day today of people have been interviewing me and I've been interviewing people all day. Everybody go check out my interview at Joe Kent and retweet it. And here, let's play this outro and get out of here. And we'll see y'all next week. This has been Provoked with Darrell Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm. Go follow at Provoked underscore show on X and YouTube. And tune in next time for more provoked.