The Duran Podcast - Iran Impasse: Trump Wants Airstrikes as US Stockpiles Depleted

Episode Date: May 23, 2026

Iran Impasse: Trump Wants Airstrikes as US Stockpiles Depleted

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the situation in Iran. Let's do an update as to what is happening with the negotiations. If there are any real negotiations taking place, the possibility of a renewed attack by the United States and Israel on Iran, we had an interesting article from Axios, if you want to believe Axios is reporting, where they claimed that Trump and Netanyahu who had a pretty difficult phone call, good cop, Trump, who wants diplomacy, bad cop, Netanyahu, who wants an attack. That was pretty much the takeaway from the Axios article.

But Trump did talk about some sort of a letter of intent that is being drafted with the mediation of Pakistan. Nothing official has come out with where we are on that. So where are we, Alexander, with everything that is happening in Iran? Well, at the moment, we are in a situation of impasse. But it's, and I think this is something we have to say, because we're getting this information now from the mainstream media in the United States. It's an accumulating mass of information now.

What we're getting is further and further information. that this impasse situation that we see is a result of a failed attack on Iran in March and April. Now, I think we need to understand that because the fact that the attack on Iran was even less successful than it initially appeared to be, I think is influencing the decision of both sides. It's making the Iranians feel confident and explains why they are taking a very tough line in negotiations. And it explains, I think, the confusion in the United States. So firstly, it now looks as if Iran has preserved most of its ballistic missiles. Its stoppile is mostly intact.

Its launches of missiles are mostly intact. They're spread out across Iran. The Iranians still have large numbers of launches close to the Strait of Hormuz. There are reports now, which, by the way, were partially confirmed to me in an open program by Jim Webb, you know, our friend who's a military person, that the Iranians have been much more successful, tracking and striking U.S. aircraft over Iran than we had previously known, and this includes stealth aircraft. There are reports that they've received further assistance from the Russians with radars, advanced radar systems. And lastly, it seems that they've been able to reactivate

A lot of their military production, they're producing drones, they might even, to some extent, at least, be busy producing missiles. Of course, the blockade, the sea blockade probably is having an effect on the Iranian economy. But we discussed previously that Iran is a country that's been accustomed over decades now to being in a state of siege. and they could probably, at least for a while, withstand this. And they are continuing to get economic help from their friends through the Caspian Sea, through the land routes across Central Asia, through Pakistan as well. So the pressure isn't as much on them as the Trump administration wants us to think. Conversely, the Trump administration finds itself in a difficult position.

The U.S. Navy has now come out publicly and said that they are not able to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Attempts to force open the Strait of Hormuz using military methods have been unsuccessful. And at the same time, as a result of that, we are seeing increasing pressure on energy prices, with reports appearing in places like the Financial Times, that June is going to be the month when the global economy basically runs out of buffers, when the reserves are depleted to the level that we're going to start to see actual shortages and rises, absolutely steep rises in energy.

costs. So the pressure isn't really on the Iranians so much as on the Americans. And I'm taking all of this information that I've just outlined from mostly the American media. Now, the question is, what does Don Trump do? At one level, I get the sense of viscerally, he finds it absolutely impossible to imagine that the United States can be in this situation. He finds it very difficult to start negotiations with the Iranians that appear to address the kind of demands that the Iranians are making. He still has pressure from people like Netanyahu and Lindsay Graham telling him we must resume the war. We can't be held hostage by Iran in the way that we are. So he's pushed in that direction sometimes.

He has these conversations with Netanyahu, and I, by the way, take very cynically this Axios article, just as you too. I'm absolutely, you know, I mean, we've had so many stories going all the way back to June last year about Netanyahu being the hard cop and Trump being the soft cop. Netanyahu wanting to attack Iran, Trump wanting to hold back. I actually thought that might be true last June before the June war. I no longer believe that. I think that this is a game that the two have been playing, and I don't take any of this seriously to say this straightforwardly. I think Trump continues to listen to Netanyahu,

continues to listen to the Israelis, finds it very difficult to accept that this mighty military machine that he has built up in his mind, as being unconquerable and unstoppable has actually been stopped and finds it very, very difficult to push forward with negotiations. But at the same time, the actual situation that he finds himself in forces him from time to time to contemplate that possibility. And he was about to launch attack on Iran a few days ago. He then called it off at the last moment. He said that it was the Persian Gulf states that talked him out of doing it. In fact, and in reality, we've had lots of

reports again in the US media that says that it was the US military itself that told him, don't do this. We're not ready. We're not in any condition to do anything that's going to change. the calculus on the battlefronts. And the Iranians are now prepared for us. They can intercept our aircraft. We might suffer more aircraft losses. And of course, it's possible that the Iranians will conduct strikes of their own across the Middle East as they've threatened. And with our arsenals depleted, we are not in a good position to do that. So it's a situation where we have a president and some of his officials that find it very difficult to accept that they are in a position of weakness as opposed to being in the position of overwhelming strength that they

imagine they would be. That is my assessment of the existing situation. What strike would the U.S. military possibly do in order to change the situation on the ground. I mean, they talk about a special operation to extract the uranium dust. Trump is now just calling it dust, right? It's dust. So we just want the dust, not that it's going to mean anything. I mean, Trump said it. It's more of a PR thing than anything else. But I want the dust, okay, an operation to pick up the dust. And the other option is just more air strikes. to accomplish what?

Are you going to get the regime change? Are you going to topple the government with more airstrikes? And we have the Washington Post report, Alexander, which says that the U.S. is stockpile of interceptor missiles. But I imagine of just about everything is depleted. I mean, they say as much in the Washington Post. 50% of their THAAD interceptors depleted. Yes.

Now, bear in mind something about this. All of these reports about the, depletion of interceptors and weapons are coming from the military. It's the Pentagon that he's briefing the media to say these things. And they're doing that as part of this argument that is clearly taking place within the White House. They're trying to get Trump to accept that this is the reality. And they're trying to get Trump to understand and to get the media out there saying that

another military strike on Iran is an incredibly bad idea. Now, that is an extraordinary situation because usually when you are in this kind of position of weakness, you don't want to publicize the fact to your adversaries. But they are obliged to do it because they're still getting this pressure from Trump. And not just from Trump, by the way, but from other people within the administration. Put the Israelis for the moment to one side. people within the administration who simply cannot get their minds round the fact that the United States is in this position. So this is what is going on at the moment in Washington.

And you ask the question, what would strikes achieve? Well, I don't think they would achieve anything good. I mean, you could undoubtedly do a lot of damage to Iranian infrastructure. But it is starting to seem as if the damage that was done to Iranian infrastructure during the 40-day war, you know, in March and April, was not as extensive as we'd been led to believe. And the Iranians who have an effective construction industry have apparently repaired a lot of the damage. So, again, you would be attacking targets which the Iranians would probably be able to repair quite quickly. And as for, you know, going deep inside Iran and extracting the material, well, I think pretty much everybody agrees that this would be such an extraordinarily high-risk operation that it's simply not one. that the United States should even consider doing.

I mean, the episode with the rescue of the F-15 navigator, if that is what it really was, I know many people still have their doubts, already show that operations deep inside Iran are extremely dangerous and, in fact, unwise. Now, Iran is under pressure too. I mean, you know, we mustn't over-stress Iran's strengths. There is a sea blockade.

It is having an effect. Inflation has gone higher inside Iran. The currency is weak. They are getting goods and materials coming into Iran through Pakistan, through Central Asia, through the railway lines and the ships that criss-crossed the Caspian Sea. But, I mean, it's not as if this isn't taking its toll on Iran or isn't making conditions of life for people in Iran harder. But it's not putting as much pressure on Iran as perhaps Trump and his officials assumed. And it's not going to force them into a compromise when the Iranians themselves feel that they are in a position of advantage.

So that's, I think, something that Trump needs to understand. I think there is still potential for a deal. I think that what we saw from China and what we seen from Russia and what we've seen from Pakistan is that if the Iranians held out for demands which those countries felt were unreasonable, there would be lots of pressure on the Iranians. Iranians to come around and to change their stance. And I don't think Iran is so strong that it can go head to head with the United States without having at least some degree of economic, diplomatic, and military support from its friends. But in order to maximize that advantage which the United

States has, it needs to undertake some proper diplomacy, which so far, it's not. not doing. I mean, these exchanges of messages, the Americans sending proposals to the Pakistanis, who then passed them on to the Iranians, the Iranians sending back basically the same proposal, set of proposals to the Americans again and again, Trump losing his temper when he sees the Iranian proposals and saying this is absolutely unacceptable, and I'm not interested in this. And the Iranians need to capitulate, which of course they're not going to do. Well, this is not the way to conduct the negotiations of this, of the sort that are needed to end this type of conflict. There need to be proper face-to-face negotiations, presumably in Islamabad, with a proper

negotiating team from the United States. The Iranians do have a proper negotiating team together. if negotiations like that happen, I think we can find a way through. But at the moment, everything is being held hostage, as I said, to the inability of some people in Washington. And by the way, also in the United States generally, to acknowledge and accept that this is a situation of impasse which derives from Iranian strength being far greater than the United States had assumed before the war started. Well, it's a waiting game. I mean, you know, you say impasse, I would say it feels like it's a waiting game where Trump is trying to. I correct myself.

You put it much more simply indirectly. No, no, I'm not saying. That is exactly what it is. It's a waiting game. Yeah. And it's also a war of nerves. And, you know, these are constant flips of position if they're intended to impress or scare the Iranians. They clearly are not.

What they're doing is they're creating confusion in Washington. And they're creating doubts amongst America's Persian Gulf allies. Well, a couple of weeks ago, or maybe even a week ago, the, the, the, the, thinking in Washington appeared to be the Iranian economy has three months, if not four, at least that's what the CIA assessment was saying, and then it's going to collapse. And it felt as if Trump was shifting more towards just focusing on sinking the Iranian economy. Can we drag this on for three months? And I believe the White House was thinking we could probably drag this on for three months, you know, Trump, Trump is Trump, and he's got his very loyal cult following. They'll believe

anything he says, and there is a part of the Republican Party, which actually believes that the United States has won this war. Yes. And so they can bank on that. And so Trump started the first, you know, two months talking about obliterated Navy, obliterated army, all of these things. and then he's shifted over to, we got to get the uranium, we can't have Iran get a nuclear weapon. And we're kind of at that stage where Trump is buying time. We're going to have a peace deal. We're not going to have a peace deal. And so he's stretching it out.

And now he's on the uranium thing. And they're trying to see if they could sick the Iranian economy. I think it's coming to, they're coming to a realization that they're not going to make it three months. It's not going to happen. I mean, you look at the bond market, you look at the energy crisis that's coming, the fertilizer and the food crisis that's about to come. And you just get the sense that they're not going to be able to outlast Iran in this war of nerves. right? And Iran could probably go till the end of the year. I mean, they have problems,

but they could probably make it until the end of the year. And I also get the sense of the blockade to energy towards China, given the meeting that took place in China, is not rattling China in the slightest, right? No. I agree with every point you've just made, and I think you're absolutely right. Now, I should say that the calculation that Iran can keep this going until the end of the year actually originates with us. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it may be, they can probably go until the end of the year. Probably.

We don't know because we don't, we don't know because we're not in Iran and we don't know exactly what is going on. But certainly the United States can't hold to this situation indefinitely. It is going to have an impact on the US economy. It is having an impact already on many of the Asian economies. And soon it will start to have a sharper impact on the European economies. The economies that are affected most at the present time, however, are America's Persian Gulf friends. Now, they're becoming very worried and nervous.

And I don't think that the Persian Gulf states like the Iranians at all. I think that they all came together before the war and said to the US, just go ahead and do it. We're all there. We're fully behind you. They assumed that it was all going to end very quickly and that Iran would collapse. They now find themselves in a situation where they are trapped in this waiting game. They've had to agree swelps with the US Federal Reserve Board in order to keep their currencies stable. because all of their currencies are linked to the dollar.

They are very, very worries about a resumption of the war, which might lead to further attacks on their infrastructure, which has already taken a lot of damage. And in Saudi Arabia's case, the Houth is joining in and closing off the Red Sea. There is also the specter of the desalination plants. potential Iranian attacks about those. And the Saudis themselves have publicly said that they are extremely worried about an attack on the desalination plants. And they have now seen that US air defense systems are not able to stop or prevent Iranian attacks on the desalination

plants. So the Saudis and the others don't. want now a return to the war. And they are beginning to reach out to the extent that they can, to the Saudis, to the Iranians, and to some of Iran's backers. So the president of the UAE, for example, had a chat with Putin the other day. The Saudi foreign minister has been very busy talking both to the Iranians and mostly to the Russians, but he's also spoken to the Chinese. You could see that they are still sniffing very, very cagely, this idea of a security system architecture in the Persian Gulf. Bear in mind that given that their currencies are tied to the dollar, it's going to be

all but impossible for them to break with the United States. United States. I mean, so I think that's a point to understand about the security architecture, idea if the United States comes down heavily against it, which it will, it can't really progress. But the Saudis do have their friends in Washington. They do have influence there. They can start putting pressure of their own. And anyway, they are worried. And they're going to start soon repatriating funds from the United States and from Europe, because even with these swaps that they've negotiated with the Federal Reserve, this is a major drain on their resources, and they are very high-spend economists, and they are very, very wary of cutting back

spending because they worry about the fragility and stability of their political systems. And this latest revelation, and I do call it a revelation, because unfortunately, I believe it to be true, that the original idea behind the American-Israeli attack was to crash the Iranian regime and replace it with Ahmadinejad of all people. Well, this isn't going to have made them feel any confidence. We have to be in a moment. I mean, it's not going to make the Saudis or the other Persian Gulf states feel any greater confidence in the quality of decision-making in Washington at all. What a wacky story, yeah, from the New York Times.

I mean, absolutely crazy. Just to have some context, the New York Times is saying that Israel and the United States is saying that Israel and the United States. States wanted Ahmadinejab, who was the former president who was under some sort of house arrest. They wanted him to become the leader of Iran once they toppled the regime. And when they attacked his house, where he was under house arrest, what they were actually doing is not going after him, but they were trying to eliminate, to eliminate his guards and the security around his house so they could free him so that then he could assume power. but he got injured in the strike, and then he got cold feet at the last moment because he was injured in the strike on his compound.

What a bizarre story from the New York Times. What do you make of it? Well, I mean, notice that there's been no convincing denials of its truth. That's the first thing to say. I mean, nobody's really come out and said this whole thing is a complete lot of nonsense. There's been no real denials about this. And again, it suggests to me, that this whole operation was based on a massive amount of misunderstanding and poor intelligence

and wishful thinking about Iran. It's extraordinary because the Israelis clearly had penetrated deep into the Iranian political and military system before the war. One gets the sense, though, that they became so fixed on covert operations inside Iran, killing nuclear scientists, disrupting Iran's various programs, you know, doing all that kind of thing. So they weren't carrying out proper assessments of the entire situation inside Iran. And anybody who remembers Amal Dina Jad and knows what a deeply discredited figure he is in

Iran and also remembers how unbelievably anti-Israeli and anti-American he was. I'm being polite about him, would know what a completely unlikely and even ridiculous figure. He would be to install as leader of a post-regime Iran. I mean, it demonstrates that in fact and in reality, the Israelis and the Americans had no one convincing to put in place of the current government. I mean, one faction seems to have been thinking of, you know, the crown prince, the former crown prince of Iran, the son of the late Shah. The another group seems to have been thinking of Ahmadinejad. None of these people is remotely in a position to lead Iran. And had any such attempt being made, I mean, it would have been quickly resulted in the decision.

the disastrous failure of the whole enterprise. Anyway, that's how neocons think. They always look at the regime change and they focus on the regime change. They never think of the day after. No. And that's what this shows. They're throwing around all kinds of names, if you're to believe any of this, throwing around all kinds of names of people who can take over for the government.

Obviously, they didn't do their homework. But they're focused on the regime change. Let's create the chaos and what happens tomorrow. We'll figure that out. How does that work out for the neocons and for all these regime changes over the past 10, 20 years? Well, for them personally, very well, they continue to run. Nobody's fired.

Nobody's fired. Their think tax still get fast amounts of money. They still write columns on the media. They still appear on television talk shows. But it's turned out very badly for the United States overall. And this is a further example of this. I mean, this was the most incredibly badly thought out operation. I mean, going into it, I mean, again, assumptions that Iran's air defense system had been devastated.

Well, it's clearly, clearly that was not the case. Assumptions that the ballistic missiles had been weakened. Again, clearly not the case. believe that there is a critical mass of people in Iran who are ready to rise up of the first opportunity and overthrow the government. Well, that hasn't happened. And the idea that there are alternative leaders in waiting,

you can step in and take charge. Well, as you said, they've been throwing names around and they've been coming up with bizarre people, you know, the son of the late Shah and Ahmadinejad. I mean, two of the most improbable people. You could conceivably imagine in today's Iran. Again, putting aside everything else, what we are looking here is a catastrophic intelligence failure on the same kind of scale as the assumption that, you know, freezing the Russian assets would cause the entire collapse of the whole Russian economy. I mean, it is on that sort of level what we're now seeing in Iran.

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