School of War - Ep 208: Mike Doran on America’s Strikes in Iran

Episode Date: June 22, 2025

Mike Doran, senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute, joins the show to break down America’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities and what might come next. ▪️ Times      •      01:00 Reactions     •      08:00 Deception     •      12:00 More to come       •      17:00 Self-deception     •      24:00 Next few days           •      31:00 Escalation     •      34:00 Not over     •      41:00 Trump is serious     •      44:00 Restraintists          Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

It's been a big night. We're going to break down the meaning and possible consequences of America's strikes on the Iranian nuclear program with Mike Duran. But first, I want to dedicate tonight's episode to all the American servicemen and women who have been killed by the Islamic Republic and its agents since the revolution in 1979. And especially to the Marines and sailors of 1st Battalion 8th Marines who were killed in Beirut in 1983. Now, let's get into it. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in grand. We'll fight on the beaches,

we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. and feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. MacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today.

Mike Duran, who is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute. Of course, importantly, he is also a regular School of War guest. And tonight he joins us, of course, to help break down what's just happened with America's strikes on the Iranian nuclear program. The president just spoke. We both listened to the speech. Mike, give us your impressions of the speech of events so far.

And if you don't mind, speak to, I know you don't have access to, you know, battle damage assessments from where you sit. But the president did claim that this was a, quote, spectacular military success that, quote, completely and totally obliterated the targets at the three sides. So curious to know your thoughts on all of this. Let's just start by saying this is an amazing evening. Before we get into battle damage assessment and everything else, Trump has cut everybody guessing about what he was going to do on this.

I think in the end he made a great decision, and we'll get into further in a minute. I think it's an historic decision. I think it's a new Middle East from here on out. I don't think Iran comes out of this the same. I don't think the U.S. Israel relationship will be the same. He's created a whole new model. There's a lot to talk about here. Let's start with the battle damage assessment.

We don't know actually yet. They hit three sites, Isfahan, Natanz, and Fordo. Natanz is the most interesting one in some ways because the Israelis already took it out. There are two elements to Natanzas, the major enrichment facility of the Iranians. It's really the hub. If the Iranian system, if the nuclear program is a kind of hub and spoke system, this is the major hub. But there's an above-ground portion and a below-ground portion, and the Israelis took out key elements of the above-ground portion,

but they did not know initially how much damage they did to the below-ground because you can't see it from satellites. You have to the Israeli assessment of what happened below-ground is totally dependent on the Iranian assessment. Once they monitor the Iranians and see what they're doing in the facility, then they can have a sense of how much of it they destroyed. The fact that the Americans went in and dropped massive ordinance penetrators, I suppose that's what they did.

On Natanz tells you that the battle damage assessment of what the Israelis did came to the conclusion that it had not been destroyed, and so they had to go back. We don't know the massive ordinance penetrator has never been dropped on a facility like Ford L. before. I'm not sure it's ever been dropped on anything. I don't know if it's ever been used in combat before. So this is really its combat debut. Really, I think what the president is saying is that the mission was a success

and that the ordinance was dropped on the facility. I think it's probably too early for them to say whether it really did the job or not. This thing is 300 feet deep encased in concrete under a mountain and so on. So we may have to yet go back a few times, and it may not have even done the job. So we don't know. The really significant thing here is that the United States has taken action and it has taken action in combat with the Israelis and very close coordination with the Israelis.

The thing that struck me the most about the president's statement was the fact that he said he made a statement of respect for BB Netanyahu, as he called him, instead of Benjamin Netanyahu, and said that they have been working very, very closely together. That's significant to me on several levels. Let's not forget that the MAGA restrainers, the Tucker Carlson's and the Steve Bannons have been saying

they've been demonizing Netanyahu for months, and they've been saying that he is trying to drag the United States into a war that's not in its interest. And Donald Trump just sent the love letter to Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon. Basically said, I decide what's in America first, what make America great, again, means, and it means a close alliance with Israel. And I'll stop here with one more statement, Aaron. This is a new model of a U.S.-Israeli cooperation.

It's historic. Let's go back, you know, to 1990-91, the Gulf War. When Saddam Hussein was lobbying scuds at Israel, the United States did everything it could to distance itself from Israel during that conflict. And to make sure that there was no Israeli military. action against Iraq while the United States was attacking Iraq for fear that association with Israel would fracture the coalition with the Arab powers. This is a whole new Middle East now where the United States is working in militarily cooperating with Israel and it believes that

in doing so it enhances its position in the eyes of its Muslim allies. That's totally new. It's never existed before. And I personally think it's fantastic. The president's praise of the Israelis and of Netanyahu certainly it gives evidence to, you know, one of two competing theories of the events of the last few weeks, which from the outside, you know, people could, could I think reasonably differ on what was going on on the inside. One inference you could draw from what appeared at times to be kind of a back and forth in White House deliberations on this stuff was that there was genuine back and forth. And the president hadn't decided.

And some parties were pushing him to make a decision in one direction. And other parties were pushing in the other direction. And what we were witnessing was the sort of result of that. Another theory was that actually the president has been, if not having made a final decision necessarily, but been fairly resolute on what he was going to do if the Iranians, in fact, you know, blew past his deadline. It did not get serious about the, I think. from the start. Maybe he had been fairly resolute on that from when he and Netanyahu had that long

one-on-one meeting at the White House earlier this year. That was another theory. At this point, I think theory number two there has been tremendously strengthened. I'm curious what you think about the two-week thing from a few days ago. So I think it was trying to get my timeline right here, but I think it was Thursday night, at least I was anticipating that something would probably happen Thursday night. And then during the day on Thursday, we heard it. actually the president is going to make up his mind in the next two weeks. And again, these sort of competing interpretations, is this now continued sort of indecision in the face of a complex situation, or in fact had the decision been made and the two weeks was part of an effort to regain surprise?

I don't know. I'm curious your thoughts. My guess here is that the decision was made, not necessarily on the timing, but the operation was planned and all of the, all of the preparations for the attack were being conducted. So I mean, moving Americans out of harm's way, getting the destroyers into the Mediterranean, getting the carrier groups in place, getting all of the equipment necessary for defense in place, all of that kind of thing was going on. But I think the president made one last attempt at negotiation. There was a mediation that went on between the Turks and the Iranians. I've heard a mediation by the Turks between the United States and the Iranians. I've heard two different

things about that mediation. One was in the media, the story I saw was that the mediation failed because the Iranians, the Turks couldn't manage to get a hold of Khomeini because his whereabouts are unknown. I heard here, I'm in Turkey right now, and here I heard a different story, and I tend to believe that one, although they could both be true. And that story is that President Trump gave the Iranians an ultimatum that he was willing to negotiate with them, provided they started the negotiation from the position of no enrichment. And then we work to fight, you know, about how how that's going to be, how that principle is going to be applied. They wouldn't accept the Pizeskian got back, the president of Iran got back to the Turks and said that they would

not negotiate on those terms. That seems to me to be kind of the way that the Iranians operate. And they're always too clever by half. And I think they saw all of the, they, they, they saw all of the discussion about fracturing of the Maga base and so on, and they thought they had more room for playing than they actually had. And they thought they could actually string out the conflict with the Israelis long enough to maybe run down the Israeli interceptor stockpiles and so on and get to a point where they would have a little bit more leverage in the negotiations. But they miscalculated again. I saw that Arachi is, the Iranian fort minister is in Turkey right now, right? Were you hanging

out with him in the hotel bar or he was there at the front of these talks. Yeah, we were doing shots with each other. So let's talk about what might happen over the next few days. In his remarks, the president was pretty stark. He said this needs to end. That boy can drink a beer. Let me tell you. This is like the stories one would hear of, you know, the planes taking off from the Gulf,

Arab states, everyone in their traditional Arab gear, the moment you're at altitude. I've seen that. I see that. Take it off. Yeah, sure. Party starts. Maybe it's the same for members of the Iranian revolutionary regime. They hide it a little more. No, you know, the president's pretty clear. Like, this needs to stop. And he clearly was willing to do his part to stop it.

But that if the Iranians didn't want to stop or if they struck back, especially at Americans, he was going to take action against targets in Iran. And he said, quote, what was it? The ability now is far greater and will be a lot easier. words words to that effect. Can I tell you what I love about Donald Trump? Sorry, I have no, no, no, tell me. Tell me. I'll tell you what I love about Donald Trump. Donald Trump, unlike every other president of the United States since Bill Clinton, or really every other United States, it's president of the United States since 1979, with the exception of Ronald Reagan, understands

the fundamental balance of power between Iran and the United States. And he understands that Iran is far weaker than the United States. And the United States can crush it like a beer can if it wants to. It is just, Trump doesn't want to do that and doesn't, and thinks that if there's a way to change Iranian behavior without crushing it like a beer can, then then that that's, That's the best way to go, because there are costs to crushing, but that there needs to be a fundamental recalibration in Tehran about what is acceptable with respect to the United States. And this support for terrorism, attacking America's allies, calling for destroying the United States, all of these things are absolutely fundamentally unacceptable.

And he intends to change the rules of the game. But every other president has not understood this. That there is a balance of power and that we can use our power to change Iranian to change Iranian behavior. Somehow in our minds, we always built these guys up as bigger than they are. Iran is a very strange country in that it has some, it's like a boxer that has one arm that's totally atrophied, one leg this week. But it has one arm with a big muscle. And that's the drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles that it has. And also it's terrorism.

So it has the nuclear program, these drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles, and the terrorism. And it uses that fearsome image that it develops or that it generates from those characteristics to cover up the fact that it doesn't have a regular army, doesn't have a regular Air Force, doesn't have a regular Navy, doesn't have a regular Navy, doesn't have any of the apt, that a middle power usually has. So therefore, is unbelievably vulnerable to the use of military force by a power like the United States, should it decide to use it. And Donald Trump, who has no background in foreign, I mean, he said he was president for four years, so he has a lot of experience. But prior to becoming president in 2016, he had no background in foreign policy. But he understood this fundamental better than, and all of these other great minds who are always coming up with all these goofy schemes like the JCPOA to moderate Iranian behavior by making Iran stronger and more capable of carrying out acts of terrorism against us. Yeah, and since 10-7, but then really, especially

just in the last week or so, since Israel began its campaign in Iran, we've seen a full test run on which kind of military capability you would rather have, the kind of military capability that you just described Iran having or the more, I was about to say more conventional in a way it is, but also the more high-tech cutting edge intelligence-driven capabilities that the Israelis have. The result seems pretty clear to me. I mean, I know we have numerous innings to go here,

but I think anyone who would choose to take the Iranian position on the map, as opposed to the Israeli position or certainly the American position is a little kooky, it seems to me. I'm almost feeling sorry for Ali Harmony. You know, he spent his entire career since 19709 building up this fearsome terror machine. And he's watching it all collapsed before he dies. It's almost a sorrowful thing. Well, you've spent a lot of time thinking about this guy and thinking about how he thinks.

And it is a sort of, it's a serious question for tonight. His, you described Iranian diplomacy a few minutes ago is too clever by half. there's also a kind of obvious recalcitrance that seems like it's stemming from homine personally at least that's that seems like a reasonable theory to me the notion for example that at no point throughout this they've been willing to seriously talk about enrichment knowing by the way that if they did if they did start talking seriously about enrichment well then they'd have many diplomatic innings to kind of play games and twist and turn and and try to bamboozle the americans and they've done it before and they might have been able to do it again just so long as

they could have swallowed their pride just a little bit and flattered the Americans a little bit, talked to the right headline words about a Richmond a little bit. They could be in a very different place right now. He completely refused again and again and again, even as the writing on the wall was getting more and more legible about what that was going to mean in the last week or so. Do you think he actually, I mean, how much self-deception do you think is going on here? I realize it's just asking you to speculate, but we look at other, you know, totalitarian

or authoritarian regimes, it would not be the first time that a leader at this stage in the game was a little delusional. Yeah, no, I think there's a strong element of delusion there and inertia. The regime is dedicated to undermining the American order globally. This is how they see it as this is their purpose. Ali Khanini sees himself as the leader of the Islamic world. He doesn't see himself. He's the supreme leader, not of the Iran and not of the Shiites.

He sees himself as the supreme leader of the entire Muslim world. This is why they have a president and very few, when foreign visitors come to Iran, very few of them only select few get to actually meet with Hamini. He also knows that it's kind of weird duality that the Iranians have. The Iranian system is analogous to the Soviet system in the late 1980s or mid-1980s. It's on its last legs. This could go on for decades. I don't think it will now, but it still could go on for some significant amount of time.

but they can't, the system is built on these principles. Look at all their, how they project power abroad through their proxies who believe in death to America, death to the Jews, and so on and so forth. So if Fomini gives up that, if he gives up the nuclear program and the dedication to fighting the United States, then he doesn't have any proxies abroad. It just, he becomes, Iran becomes a very small, I mean, it's a very large state, but it's weak. I mean, its economy is a shambles.

And it becomes a weak and vulnerable middle power. And also, the minute he starts showing the kind of weakness, anything other than total rejection of the Americans and ridicule of them, then he opens himself up to challenges domestically. Part of the way they control the country domestically is by creating all of these tensions with the outside world. You know, they're not, they're very sophisticated, the Iranians. The IRGC doesn't fantasize about being North Korea and totally closing off Iran from the outside world. but it wants to make sure that it has control of all the major conduits between Iran and the outside world. Military conduits, economic conduits, even the flows of population, and so on. In order to do that, you have to have an ideology that puts you at odds with the rest of the world.

So I don't think he can walk and chew. I mean, I don't think he can get rid of the nuclear program, cut a deal with the United States, allow NIAEA inspectors to dismantle Fordo and maintain the control over that apparatus. So there's a bunch of factors that we have to take into account as we think through possible iterations in the next few days. One, you were just pointing to, you know, domestic Iranian attitudes towards the regime attitudes within the various elites towards Chaminet. That's one, that's one set of considerations, another set of considerations. are depending on what Iran does, or maybe in Israel's case, either way.

I'm not actually sure how to evaluate that, what the Israelis do or what even the Americans do, if Iran strikes back, to further destabilize the regime. Then the third factor is what might the Iranians actually do. Like you, I'm generally pleased with what just happened and think in some ways it's a long time coming. There are a lot of Americans, a lot of dead American troops at the hands of this regime. That said, you know, they do still have some tools. boy, do they deserve this. No, no, it's, I'm actually not sure how well people remember it.

I don't know how much it. The 84 Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon. The, I don't know how many troops were killed by the IEDs in Iraq. The Hobart Tower's bombing in Saudi Arabia on and on. These guys, boy, did they have it coming. Totally. Again, this is why I love Donald Trump. Finally, I don't know why.

I don't know what the magic hold that these thugs in Tehran had over the thinking of every other American president. But clearly, they don't have it over him. And I thank God for that. Well, I've long nursed a theory that one of the ways to help you understand Donald Trump is to think back to what was in the news and what were the major issues and fascinations of the day in the early 1980s. that's sort of the key period because if it was a big deal then you know like And that was humiliating

We allowed ourselves to be humiliated by a third rate power Right And yeah you're probably right That's a really good way of thinking about it For sure So you got all these factors You got regime stability

You got Israeli American designs Potentially on the regime You have various tools That the Iranians may have to strike back You've got the ways in which We could respond on a military scale the ongoing Israeli campaign against the ballistic missile launchers, like there's a lot, there's just a lot going on here. Help us think through the next few days and what you see is

likely or unlikely, what you are worried about, what you're not worried about. Well, let's talk about on the tactical level and then go and then to this strategic, because there is the immediate fallout from this attack. So the Iranians always threatened really a fearsome retribution if we did this fearsome retribution against our allies, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, maybe Jordan and others, fearsome retribution against Americans. I saw just before I came on your podcast that the Iranian TV is saying, no American will be safe anywhere. And Donald Trump clearly gave them a warning that, you know, he was aware of that and said, if you do that, we will come down on you like no one has ever come down on you before. Now when he says that, I think there's some credibility.

so we have to manage the fallout and deter them and make sure that if they do take any action or their proxies take any action toward Americans, they're going to be held responsible. Like I said, like they never been held responsible before. And my first, well, I wouldn't start picking targets, but I'm sure that they will, they have already thought about it. I'm sure they've already communicated to the Iranians that they should really watch themselves very carefully. And frankly, I suspect the Iranians will.

Because now, up until now, they were trying to keep the Americans out of the conflict. Now the Americans are in, they're going to try to play, they got to want to hold on to the regime. They have two major goals right now. Hold on to the regime and hold on to what's left of their ballistic missiles. And that gets me into the strategic question because there's a potential disagreement now between the Israelis and the Americans over the goals of the conflict. Trump has been very consistent all along saying the goal is to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapons program. The Israelis, since they opened up this round of the conflict, have made it pretty clear that they have two strategic goals. One is preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, getting rid of the nuclear program, and the other is destroying their ballistic missile program, which is the greatest threat to Israel.

They thought, the reason that they developed this second goal is that after the October round of fighting, you'll remember, they, Israelis destroyed all of the air defense system of the Iranians and then took out, among other things, these mixers for the solid fuel propellant of the medium-range ballistic missiles, which are the ones that are causing the most damage to Israel. In doing that, they thought they took the whole production. of those missiles offline for a year because they didn't think, they thought it would be hard for the Iranians to rebuild those, construct those mixers. But they were wrong because the Chinese stepped in and built them for them or delivered them to them. And the Iranians developed a new strategic goal of doubling or tripling within five years their stockpile of medium-range ballistic missiles. From the Israeli point of view, this would be This would give Iran through conventional missiles the equivalent of a nuclear weapons capability. They would have enough missiles to overwhelm all of Israel's defenses and do terrible harm

to critical national infrastructure as well as the civilians. And they couldn't tolerate that. So they have to take out that program. The regime is going to be focused on survival now. It's going to be focused on starting negotiations with the Americans. They'll probably start now from the zero enrichment point of view. and they'll seek to get a ceasefire on that basis and then preserve their ballistic missile program.

The Israelis are going to want to take it out. So there's a big decision there. Before that, we also have to do the battle damage assessment. Did we actually destroy Fordo? You and I, we got ahead of ourselves. We're kind of thrilled by the fact that the decision has finally been made and we're moving forward on this. But we don't actually know that the job is done.

All good points. And I was about to make a crack that it might be easier for them from a technical standpoint to begin negotiations on a zero enrichment basis when all the equipment for enrichment has been destroyed. But I take your point. It is an important point. You know, if I, if I just had to put my money on one general shape of what might come next, I just, my mind goes back to Soleimani and his death and their response to that, which, which was, you know, in the range of options from full overwhelming response on the one hand to slinking away, on the other hand, And they chose a kind of gestural missile strike at an American installation in Iraq, after which it was crickets, after which they just went quiet.

And Trump made the decision not to respond to that strike, which in the end hadn't killed any Americans. It had caused a traumatic brain injury to dozens. It did. It did. Yes. I remember that. I remember that at the time. But the president didn't, he didn't strike back after that.

And then the thing went quiet. And then what was notable to me was the Iranians went quiet. They really were visibly deterred after that for some time. And I just wonder, you know, looking at the next few days, I mean, what's been going on is of greater consequence, not that Soleimani was of no consequence, but this was really significant. And the range of options, some sort of gestural response, which maybe they cross their fingers and toes and hope they don't kill any Americans, is certainly an option on the table. If they do go out and kill Americans, I'm inclined to take Donald Trump at his word. And this, of course, gets us, I wanted to ask you about the concerns of our friends on the. right. You cited Tucker Carlson earlier, those who are counseling that this is going to take

us to World War III, which I find on its face to be kind of a silly notion. If anything, what Iran has learned in the last few days is that an access is not an alliance and that Russia and China are not coming to help them and never were going to. But set that aside as sort of a silly idea. The idea that this could spiral and there could be further entanglement, further American military involvement, American casualties, that's not impossible. That's not crazy. impossible. How do you think about it? Yeah. The further American involvement and escalation is definitely possible. The decision there is in the hands of Ali Khomeini. I take Donald Trump, like you said, at his word. I think the response, if they kill Americans or their proxies start

killing Americans, attacking Americans, I think the response of the United States is going to be so furious that if they're not deterred now, they will get deterred really. quickly. The regime is in a very, very precarious, dangerous position, more dangerous than it's ever been before. I don't think it has the, I don't think it has the option that it carried out, that it doesn't rationally have the option. That doesn't, that they made a lot of misjudgments. They may make a misjudgment again. My guess is that if you and I were in the government right now, we would find that our inboxes would be full of messaging from IRGC commanders saying, hey, I don't want in on this fight with you. I want to get out. I want to get out or I want to,

you know, I want to find a way to get along with you. We don't, we don't fully know the effects that the Israeli, all we're seeing is propaganda. We're seeing that Israeli attacks and then we're seeing the propaganda that both sides are putting out. But there's a lot of, there's a lot of movement behind the scenes. Everybody, you can see all the guys are saying, put me in coach. Macron is saying he wants to get involved in the negotiations. Erdogan is actually involved in the negotiation. So I'm sure the Turks have lots of people reaching out to them and so on. So there, there's no way that we're going to, we can predict what's going to happen in the next few days. and we should be ready to be surprised.

We might be very, very surprised. You know, somebody might put a bullet in Harmony's head, you know, not an American, I mean, an Iranian, and we may suddenly find ourselves negotiating with a strong man. And that's just one of the possibilities. We don't actually have a good view of what, from the outside. It's hard to know what's going on on the inside. I want to let you off the hook here because I can see the sun coming up over your shoulder,

and I'm just admiring your commitment to your trade as an end. Analyst and commentator here. It's a big night. I can't think of anyone at a rather talk to about it. It's a pleasure. That goes both ways. But since you're in Turkey,

stepping back, big picture, what is the view from Ankara on these sorts of events? How do you think people will be reacting to it today? What does the future of the region look like with Iran now genuinely just taking

shot after shot to the face like this? The Turks think that the next era, the next decade is going to be their decade. I don't know, that's probably to, let's just say the Turks think that they're going to be the big winners of this conflict, and I agree with them. I should be careful again. My assessment is that Turkey is going to be the big winner. And when I put it to Turks, they said, oh, you might be right. You know, they're very careful not to go around preening.

But I think, you know, President Erdogan made a speech today in which he attacked Israel and said Israel has to be rained in. Israel's a Nazi state and so on and so forth. But he didn't do anything. He has a lot of influence over Syria. Israeli planes are flying over Syria to get to Iran. Israel has an unobstructed aerial bridge from Jerusalem to Tehran. It goes over a territory that the Turks could have a lot of influence over if they wanted to, and they haven't done a thing to obstruct. From their point of view, they sit and they watch these two guys fighting it out. Iran is a great rival of, it's a regional rival of, of turkeys. They don't want to, they don't want to get directly involved in any conflict with it, but they don't, they like their, they like their Iranians

chastened. And so I think if you're sitting in, if you're sitting in Ankara, you can, the, the Turks also like stability. They like stability. And when President Erdogan said, destabilization of Iran can mean refugee flows to Europe. and to us, they don't want a bunch of Iranian refugees in Turkey. They don't want it. They're serious about it. They want stability. They would like this war ended.

They'd like it ended through negotiation. They're telling that to Trump all the time. Muhammad bin Salman is saying the same thing. So they would like to be the architects of bringing this thing to an end. But they can look and see that this weakening of Iran means, for example, Iran is going to have less control over proxies in Iraq. So I think we're going to see rise of Turkish power in Iraq. The other thing I think we're going to see, you know, one something you and I think

have talked about in the past, one third of all Iranians are Azerbaijanis. Azerbaijani's are Turks. And they speak Azerbaijani language is fully intelligible to Turkish, to Turks in Turkey. The Azerbaijanians and Iran consume increasingly Turkish and Azerbaijani media. there is going to be that the regime that's in place right now is the Islamic Republic is Persian nationalist inflected. And it has, you know, it can, depending upon what audience is talking to, it can, it can be Shiite extremists, it can be third worldist against, you know, the oppressed of the earth

against the United States, and it can also be Persian nationalist. So one of the things that the regime is saying to its own population is after us, the deluge. So if we go down, they're saying to the Persians, if we go down, you Persians go down and the minorities take over at the forefront of the minorities, the Azerbaijani's. I think we can expect to see, I'm not calling for the crack up of Iran along ethnic line. or anything like that. And I don't think the Turks want that. Like I said, Turks like stability.

They don't want changing of borders or anything like that. But we're going to see much greater influence in Iran of the Turkic minority, of its cultural concerns, its values, its desire for good relations with its neighbors. We're going to see that in the new Iran that is going to emerge out of this one way or another. Turks have to be aware of that. They're not talking about it. They're probably, you might even not be thinking about it at this point because they are, you know, the Turkish state is a stability machine.

But they're going to be the big winners. Just like after, you know, Israel hollowed out, Hisbalah, then that weekend the Assad regime, and the Turks came in and they took all the chips off the table. That's what's going to happen in this regionally, speaking, that's what's going to happen in this Iran-Israel contest. When it's all over, there's going to be Turkey and Israel. And it's going to be the job of the United States to sort out relations between the two of them. I fully believe that Donald Trump can do that job. I think he

understands that. I really do think he understands that, and I think he can do that job. So that's going to be very interesting. But I don't want to get ahead of myself. This war is not over. It's It's not over. And ending wars is not a simple thing. Just a small point, you mentioned that air bridge from Israel through Syria in the direction of Iran. And one of my favorite little moments of the last week, so much has happened. So it kind of came and went quickly was when the leader of Syria, Shara announced that

Syrian airspace was, I can't remember the exact words, but, you know, Syrian airspace is available for the Israelis, you know, something to that effect. Remember, the IAF had been up there for days, if not indefinitely. And I just, that's actually, I understand why he played it amusing, but it's actually a big deal because behind him stands the church. And the Turks are saying, don't get in the way. Don't get in the way of this. So that's the thing about Turkey we need to understand, that we need to remember is that there's the fearsome rhetoric of Erdogan, which I don't, I don't discount the significance of it. I don't, I understand why it unnerves the Israelis and why it. It leads them, inclines them to see him as an enemy. But let's not forget the actions. The actions, in my mind, speak louder than the words. They at least speak as loud as the words, and we should recognize that.

My favorite moment last week was Arachi going to Europe and having to ask the Israelis to totally control Iranian airspace to let him fly unimpeded out. So I tweeted something about, you know, Zionist scum, please let me, please let me, please approve my route to Europe so I can go denounce you. Yeah, I think the problem back in World War II in the Pacific was Yamamoto forgot to ask for that when he did that inspection tour down in the Solomons. That's why we shot him down. Sorry, that one was from that was from the vault. That was it was a decouple.

Well, Mike, I'm just glad we. we can pivot to Asia now. We're done. We're having a lot of fun here, Mike. What does this all mean for the restraints? Donald Trump, you know, there are a couple of things that are just fascinating about what he's done here. He's defined a new model of the relations between the United States and its allies in the Middle East, for sure, where the, where the ally does most of the work and the United States supports from some distance. And I think that Middle East, I think that analogy or that model can be applied in East Asia and Europe and elsewhere.

In doing that, he has also downgraded the restraint in the discussion. I mean, one of my favorite moments in this episode was the way the president used Steve Bannon in an act of misdirection to give the Iranians the sense that they had more play than they did because he because he very ostentatiously you received Steve Bannon in the White House. There was all this reporting that went out that Bannon came in with these messages that don't listen to Netanyahu, don't go to war. It'll mean lots of the Americans killed. This is the betrayal of your legacy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And all that was reported out of the He came right before the two-week pause.

It was the two-week pause was announced just hours after that. Yeah, so it looked like he was really caving to Steve Bannon. And he really used it just to fool the Iranians. And that's got, if you're Steve Bannon tonight, you don't feel quite as bad as Ali Homanie, but you realize that you were played. And that one of the things that Trump was doing is he was showing to the Maga Bay. that Steve Bannon doesn't speak for him. Tucker Carlson doesn't speak for him.

He's, as he said in that interview in the Atlantic in response to the criticisms from Tucker Carlson, who are you? You know, I'm the guy who I'm the guy who defined America first. I'm the guy who came up with the slogan and I know what it means. And it means no nuclear weapons for Iran. What do you not understand, Kuki Tucker? So I think, I think this will be really clear to everyone now that these guys do not speak for the president. They don't. They have some views that he wants to hear and think about, but they actually have nothing to say about foreign policy, really. Their views about foreign policy, they use the world beyond our borders as on screen to project attitudes that have everything to do with domestic politics and nothing to do

with how we actually behave abroad. I do think one of the reasons why this group has been so fired up at the prospect of these strikes on Iran, is that they've rhetorically put themselves so far out on the limbs. This is people like Tucker, people like, you know, Kurt Mills, the American Conservative, as another guy who's been particularly vocal the last few weeks. You know, their conception of the use of force by America is that any and every use of force is another Iraq war, which could likely lead to World War III. And that's such an overextended position.

It's such a mischaracterization of reality that them, what you're vulnerable or exposed to is that if there is a limited and successful military action that clearly achieves its goals at relatively, we'll just say at acceptable cost, well, then your whole position has shown to be ridiculous. Oh, that's a really good point. So it's really important to them that this didn't happen. Now, this could still, I mean, there are things that could go terribly wrong here. And we both know, we're both grownups.

We both know that that's the case. But whatever it is, it's not. the invasion of Iraq. Donald Trump and his team are not going to put troops on the ground in the way that we had in Iraq or Afghanistan. That's just simply not in the card. So whatever spirals out here or plays out here will be fundamentally different from that. I think there's an excellent chance that this will be a success. And that is very, very bad for them. Not only for the reasons that you just laid out, that it's just bad to be used by the president like this and bad to be kind of irrelevant and lose a policy to play. Also, just the whole lie that you've operated on for years now and the sort of

dishonest contribution to this, you know, in the old days we would have said Vietnam syndrome, but to this kind of Iraq syndrome and using that as a tool, they were exposed all along. And this is bad. This is a bad moment for them. Yeah, you've said that really well. Basically, their position is there's no such thing as deterrence. It's not just, we don't, there's, there's an arrogance there, too, that's really in both of their cases. And I usually avoid, I do usually avoid discussions of personalities and so on. But it's really striking with the guard to Tucker Carlson and Ben. They got, there's something in Trump.

I don't quite know what it is, that he invites people to believe that they could become his Rasputin. You know, that there'll be the Spengali. that he'll become their puppet. John Bolton was like that. And Steve Bannon was like that when he got into power. He started when he was Trump's in the first Trump administration, he was engaged in all kinds of palace machinations

that he shouldn't have been involved in. Somehow he started to believe that he was the guy who got Trump elected. He was Trump's brain. I don't know what, I think Trump is an exceptionally good politician. I think he has outstanding instincts. I think if like on the messaging, on honing in on Iran, cannot have a nuclear weapon, right? He got down to the essential element of the national interest

and kept explaining that over and over again. He explained it on the campaign trail, and he explained it once he was not, or said it. But he hasn't put around him people who articulate what he actually believes. There are all these people, all these restrains in the White House. You know, he's got Marco Rubio, he's got Pete HECF, and so on. But he has all these restrainers who are telling people something else other than what he, the president believes. Steve Bannon thinks that he can actually speak in the president's name and pull the president toward him.

It's an incredible arrogance. Mike Duran, it's a huge night. And it's a thrill to talk it all over with you. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.