The Duran Podcast - Iran War: Hubris, Miscalculation, and the Clash of Interests w/ Joe Kent

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

Iran War: Hubris, Miscalculation, and the Clash of Interests w/ Joe Kent

All right, Alexander, we are very honored and very happy to have with us, Mr. Joe Kent, a man who does not need any introduction, but is someone that we are very, very pleased to have with us on the Duran. So we can talk about everything that is happening in the Middle East. We can talk about the conditional ceasefire, the talks that have been confirmed for Pakistan to take place in the next day or two. and we can also discuss all the various plans that are being debated and discussed the 15-point plan, the 10-point plan. A lot to get to. Mr. Jo Kent, thank you so much for joining us on the Duran.

I pass it over to you, Alexander, and to you, Mr. Joe Kent. Indeed, it is a huge privilege. And as Alex correctly says, one in which our guest, Joe Kent requires little in the way of introduction. I'm sure that all of our viewers know about him. And I would speak for myself. I'm very grateful for the information he's already provided in many platforms about the decisions that have been made already. I would quickly say that information that has come out about how the decision to launch the attack on the 28th of February was made, seems to me to corroborate everything that Joe Kent has been telling us.

We now know, for example, the central role, the Prime Minister Netanyahu and the head of Mossad, Mr. Bonner, made in arriving at that decision. So this is something that I think it's worth pointing out. And obviously, Mr. Kent is able to provide us with more analysis and discussion and explanation of where we are. Because that was where we were, the decision to go to war. Let us now discuss where we are. We are now in a ceasefire situation. There is great muddle and confusion about the nature of the ceasefire.

but it looks as if we're going to have talks, finally, direct talks between the United States and Iran. These are going to take place in Islamabad. The vice president, J.D. Vance, is leading the U.S. delegation. Mr. Kent, is this a good thing? Is this something we should be hopeful about? Well, it's a good thing in the sense that it's better than where we're, were 48 hours ago when we were in a situation of continued escalation, the streets of Hormuz were shut down. The president was threatening to, you know, annihilate an entire civilization. There

seemed to be no end in sight. So I'm very glad that the president and the Iranian side agreed to a temporary ceasefire. I know there's been some bumps in that ceasefire, but that's kind of the way it goes. And that they're actually heading to the negotiating table. That's very positive. It's very positive that we're going to send someone as senior as the number two in our entire government, JD Vance. So that is a very good thing. And you opened up with the discussion of how we got into this war, the role that Netanyahu played. And like you said, that's in the past, but that directly affects where we are right now. Because we've already seen the Israelis have attempted to basically sabotage this round of ceasefire talks as well.

Basically within, I think, hours of the president putting out that we had agreed to a ceasefire walking us back from that ledge, the Israelis launched their biggest campaign yet into Lebanon against Hezbollah. Now, this isn't a debate of whether. or not, Israel has a right to go after Hezbollah who's threatening their own borders. That's not the discussion here. The discussion here is the actions that Israel is taking, completely funded by us, completely bankrolled by the U.S. taxpayer, are affecting the strategic outcome that our nation is trying to have that actually affects not just our country, but the entire global economy because of the Strait of Hormuz. So I think the first order for the vice president and for the

president's team is to get the Israelis under control. And I think that's going to take President Trump calling directly to President Netanyahu. And actually this time, not just threatening, but actually taking away some of the defense funding that we're giving them, taking away features of the defense that we provide them so that they actually have to take some of their offensive capabilities off of the offense and use it for the defense. I have to say that there is a lot about the Israeli approach, which I simply do not understand. Because there is debate about why this war was launched. at all, but one thing we seem to know is that the objective, the original objective that the Israelis had was that it would result in the collapse of the Iranian government. This is what that New York Times article says, the Prime Minister and the Mossad chief advocated. That hasn't happened. Most

people now agree that it isn't going to happen in any proximate time. Israel, however, has been under attack itself and there is a general global crisis in the world economy and the United States has taken some losses. How is any of that to Israel's advantage? I simply cannot understand that. Why do people not point this out to Prime Minister Netanyahu and to his government that actually a ceasefire now, some kind of truce and extended truce is better for Israel than that which we have previously had? I agree with you, but also we share a similar background, a Western mind. The Israelis are interesting because they sound very much like Americans in many cases because a lot of them are dual citizens. However, they think very differently than we do.

I've actually had this discussion with David Barnaya well over a year ago when he said, hey, we think now is a great time for us to take down the Iranian regime by striking at the head of the state snake, by striking at the Iatola, by striking at the IRGC. And the question I asked him was I said, hey, don't you think that that's going to cause a rally around the flag of effect. Like already the Ayatoll and the energy, see, they're not popular inside of Iran. So why don't we let that, you know, play out, sanction them, kill key leaders of terrorist organizations that are backed by Iran. But if we go for regime change, won't that work against that stated goal? And his answer was very interesting because he's a very smart guy. And he was like, yeah, we think that that would happen initially. We think it might even happen for quite some time. But basically, the Israeli calculus was anything is better than Iran being strong. So even if it results, in a high degree of chaos, the Israelis are okay with that. And so I think we have to realize that Israel's stated goal, even though a lot of times just for the sake of, you know, expediency, we'll say it's regime change. Really, the Iranians are basically good with even just like

regime chaos, regime decapitation, as long as they are not, they, the Iranians are not capable of striking and going on the offense against Israel. And also as long as we, the Americans, are footing the vast majority of the bill and shouldering the burden of the military operations. It's a very shrewd and pragmatic position that the Israelis have, but they just view it differently than we do. In the West, when we say that we're going to change regime, we want a step one through 10 solution on how this is going to work, and it needs to be clean, it needs to be tight, and there needs to be a timeline. The Israelis think in a very Middle Eastern sense where they're like, we can create chaos and we can exploit chaos, and we're fine with chaos. And so again,

this is where we have to be honest with ourselves and say that, like, our partner, that we're paying for their entire defense budget, they, they really have a different goal than us. So we should not be partnered with them in this war. And we most certainly should not let their strategic objective that's different than ours dictate how the peace agreement goes. Do you think that the Iranians, how do they see this now? They say that they've been attacked, that they have great mistrust of the United States, that it was very difficult, apparently, to persuade them to agree to a ceasefire at all. that China, according to some reports, had to weigh in to get them to agree.

And, well, that does seem to me, or at least I think there is, some sign that there's dissension amongst them about this, that some of them actually would have preferred the situation to continue as it was. What are your thoughts about that? And why would Iran prefer the war to continue? And do you think that there are these divisions in Iran that's? some people can see. There most certainly is. And again, this is where the path that we've chosen kind of worked against our stated goal. We killed the Ayatollah that basically had a prohibition on the

development of nuclear weapons. And that was actually had restrained the IRGC had restrained the proxies for well over a year while negotiations played out. However, at every iteration of negotiations, we ended with some sort of a ruse where we ended up attacking Iran. And in many cases, either us or the Israelis attacking the negotiators we were just directly dealing with. So it really hurt our credibility. The Iranians are pretty pragmatic, but unfortunately, the more of the moderates will we kill off, the hardliners are going to come up. We're going to say, look, we told you guys, you can't negotiate with the Americans, you can't negotiate with the Israelis, they never do it in good faith. Let's just keep fighting. And the difference between now and previous iterations we've had against

Iran is that the Iranians realize that geography works out in their favor, and they can strangle the straight-of-horm moves. They can affect world energy prices and commerce by controlling that with very little effort whatsoever. So considering the fact that they now have control of the straight-up form moves, they're using it really offensively for the first time, basically since the 1980s, that they really kind of don't need this negotiation. So I think we're fortunate in the sense that they actually do still have a handful of pragmatic folks left in their government who are saying, like, okay, if the Americans are going to come and they're going to send a senior enough delegation, they're going to send the vice president, we should at least participate in this. And yeah,

They may have, in some views, come in high with their negotiation starting point of saying, like, you know, the ceasefire includes Hezbollah as well. And in some cases, I understand where we can say, like, that's completely unreasonable. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. But again, what's more important? Getting the Strait of Hormuz open, ending this war, or getting into a squabble over Hezbollah. I mean, again, Hesbola is like not even, you know, it's not a major issue for Americans. It's a major issue for the Israelis. But, again, like, we should stop thinking about what Israel needs.

in this situation and work on pursuing our own objectives while there are still Iranians left that have a voice in their government that are willing to sit down to the negotiating table with us. And look, just honestly, because of the way the last couple of iterations of negotiations went, I think we're actually going to have to put forward a decent amount of good faith to make sure the Iranians know that we're serious about actually ending this conflict. How well does to, how much contact has the United States had diplomatically with Iranians? Because this is something I, the U.S. everyone knows the reason. They don't have an embassy in Tehran and the Iranians don't have an embassy in Washington. But obviously there have been contacts at various times.

Were the contacts during the Iraq war? Have there been contacts since? And how much contact has the U.S. had with the IRGC, which is a organisation which I think it would be quite useful to know a little bit about, because at times it sounds like a military organisation, and other times it looks like a sort of military political organisation. The exact nature of what the IRGC is precisely is something that is never discussed or explained very well, or what its even structures are. So can you talk about that a little? Firstly, about the level of contacts the US has had with the Iranians. And can you tell us a little bit about the IRGC,

about how disciplined it is, if it is disciplined, what its structures are? Is it really in a position to lead and control a country like Iran, and well, which also has, as I understand it, a more conventional military as well. Yeah. So as to our contact with Iran, obviously, like you said, there's no embassies. That's well known. We've had a good deal of contact with them, especially in this administration. Steve Witkoff ran a very aggressive set of negotiations for quite some time ahead of the 12-day war, after the 12-day war. So there's been a lot of diplomatic connectivity there, especially with the foreign minister,

Rachi and his team. Historically, we didn't have a lot of contact prior to this round of negotiations. The Obama administration, obviously, to get the JCPOA worked out, there was relationships there, even to the point of direct negotiations and engagement. However, I think what gets overlooked a lot is just how closely we interacted with and dealt with the Iranians in the Iraq war. Obviously, there was an adversarial relationship where the Iranians were providing weapons in training advanced roadside munitions, or at least the training to make the advanced roadside munitions to a lot of the Shia insurgent groups that were fighting against us. However, after we left Iraq in 2011 and the ISIS threat took back over, we had to go back into the country. The government

of Iraq at the time was very sympathetic to the Iranians. A lot of them were Iranian proxy members, previously part of the Dawa Party, the Bader Party. And then there was this thing called the PMF, the popular mobilization forces that was stood up, that basically was a massive Shia militia that was mobilized by the Ayatollah Sistani down in Najaf, who put out a call for every able-bodied male to pick up a rifle against ISIS. And so at the time, then the IRGC came back over, the Kuds Force, led by Kossam Soleimani, who had previously been our adversary. They came over and they basically fought and served as the late infantry while we provided through special operations a lot of the air cover and heavy artillery to take out ISIS. So there was this period of time over the course of probably

about five to sevenish years where we had a common objective against ISIS that was shared with the Iranians. And so me, when I was in special operations and in the CIA, we actually ended up working in close proximity a lot to a lot of the ground level could's force officers. Most of them, because they didn't want to get in trouble with their higher up, they wouldn't come and directly engage with us. However, they would go to their Iraqi counterparts, whether it was Kurdish Peshmerga or whether was members of the Iraqi government. And we actually worked out a lot of working relationships that way. And those relationships stayed to this day.

The last time I was in, the last two times I went to Baghdad as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, I was engaging with a lot of the same Peshmerga officers I had dealt with who were now in senior levels of the Kurdish regional government, both in Iraq and Syria, who had direct frequent communication with Iranians because they're their neighbors. They're in some ways they do security cooperation with them. And then the Iraqi government in Baghdad, the actual government of Iraq, their official leaders, whether it was members of the popular mobilization forces, the Iraqi military, the Iraqi national security advisor, these are people who could pick up a phone and directly

pass messages right to the Iranians. So we have the ability to talk directly to the Iranians. So again, where Israel comes in, this adversarial relationship, it really gets in the way and clouds what should be very clear-cut security objectives that we have and the ability to pursue them directly with the Iranians. As to the IRGC question, the IRGC is very interesting. It is very much, it really gained a lot of steam during the Iraq-Aran war. And it was that, you know, the most hardcore volunteers, the people who had really supported the Iranian revolution, which really wasn't initially all that popular in Iran. But because of the Iraq-Iran war,

they became very galvanized. They became very heroic. And so the IRC became like its own separate military of volunteers as opposed to the conscript, regular military, the Artech, the besiege. But you also have professional military officers in the Artech and in the regular Iranian forces as well. So they have a lot at depth. And what the IRGC has done very effectively is they've developed asymmetric capabilities. They deal directly off all Iran's proxies. But they've also gotten embedded into the Iranian banking system, all of the Iranian commerce systems. They run a lot of the intelligence services, even though there is another separate and competitive

Iranian intelligence service. So look, the idea that we can just kill a certain amount of Iranian leaders, like you hear Secretary of War Heggseth come out and be like, we've killed, you know, a thousand IRGC members. You know, like at the end of the day, they have so much depth in their system that we're seeing right now. There's not a number of them that we can kill that's going to make the whole thing collapse like a house of cards. That premise that we can just kill a certain number. And then all of a sudden we've killed all the hardcore guys and like some Persian Thomas Jefferson is going to pop up and everything is going to be great in Iran. That's just a myth that basically leads to an never-ending cycle of conflict. Is there any commonality of interest between the United

States and Iran at all? Because, well, these two countries, Iran, the United States, in an adversarial relationship since at least the 1979 revolution. But I've known many Iranians, I know many Iranians in London, who actually have very favourable views of the United States, just to say. And not of Britain, for all kinds of historical reasons, but they used to distinguish between Britain and the US. Is there any way to build – are there any commonalities of interest? And if so, what might they be? And is it possible to build on them in some way, to find a way back? I think at a very basic level, like the Iranians want to be recognized as a major power because Persia's always been a major power. It's just a geographic reality. And they want stability. And they want to be able to choose their own government. I mean, their biggest beef with us is, you know, the coup against Mossadegh in the 50s, the CIA orchestrated. And then propping up the Shah and how brutal a Shah was to his own people. And then supporting Saddam and the Iraq-Aran war. And then basically after 9-11, when the Iranians kind of extended the hand and said, hey, we have a common enemy here.

of Wahhabist, jihadis, we kind of smacked it away, threw them into the access of evil, and then, you know, it invaded Iraq and made it seem like we were coming into Iran next, because that's a lot of what the Israelis were saying. Benjamin and Yahoo and Sharon were saying,

like, yeah, we should go into Iraq, because it's a great launching point for ops into Iran, or ops into Syria, et cetera. So I think we can find a common ground with Iranians and just like, hey, haven't we had enough war and strife in the Middle East? Wouldn't it be better if you guys were freely trading your own oil on the black market or on the regular market, as opposed to the black market. And we had a good normal relationship in terms of commerce.

Commerce could flow freely through the Straits of Hormuz, but also more broadly, too. And I would focus on this a lot in my engagements inside of Iraq and just said, hey, look, when ISIS was taking over large swaths in the Middle East, it was the Iranians. It was the Shias in Iraq that really and the Kurds. But they're the ones who stood up and fought back. that evil because everybody in the region agrees that ISIS is a major threat. ISIS, that bin Ladenite brand of Salfi jihadism is absolutely barbaric. It's evil and it's destructive to everyone. The Persians, the Shias, they stood up against that.

And at the end of the day, if you just look at the track record of terrorism, there's not a lot. There's hardly any, really, Persians or Shiites that have gotten on an airplane and tried to fly to America to kill us. However, the Sunni Arab, Southwil Hobbies, like, there's been quite a few that have. So there are natural alliances that we can form. But I think in general, pretty much every country in the region right now, they want to be done with these wars. They want to find a way where we can have normal relations and be prosperous.

So I think that's the most common ground that we can find with them right now, the most pragmatic common ground anyways. Just look at the situation that we have now. the Iranians still control the straight of almost. This is what came out of this ceasefire at the moment. And they are still controlling access through it, and they're demanding that ships pay $2 million. And there's an article today in the Financial Times, which says the ship owners and insurance companies

are very unhappy about that, and they're worried about breaching sanctions if they do, and nobody's, everybody's very nervous about this whole situation. How do we get a straight of Hormuz reopened to normal commercial traffic again? In Europe, we are particularly sensitive to this. We are now absolutely in a situation of energy crisis, more than in the United States. In Asia, still more so. So this is what I think the rest of the world would want to see as the priority now to get the straight of Hormuz open.

How is that going to be achieved? Can it be achieved by military means? I know you've talked about this, but can you say something about that further? And if not, is there a quid pro quo that can be agreed with the Iranians in order to get the Strait of Hormuz, not just reopened, but perhaps accepted again as an international waterway. Yeah, in terms of the military solution, and I think this is a problem that we have a lot in the West, we will always say, like, hey, can we do this military operation

and we'll assess it like it exists in a vacuum? So can we take the Straits of Hormuz? Yeah, we got a really big Navy. We got a really big military. If we committed everything that we had to it, I'm sure that we could get the Straits of Hormuz open. However, the second day, the third day, the third month, the third year,

That requires us being there and continuing to make that the focal point of our military operations, maybe hoping that other countries are going to come along and help out with that. But how many countries realistically have a Navy can project forces or willing to take losses that can actually help out with that? And do we have the political will to make that actually last? And so if the Iranians saw us try to do this massive military flex in there, I feel like they would sit back and let us try. and then they would grind us down, just like we have been ground down Iraq and Afghanistan and all these other places,

and watch us suffer and watch the rest of the world suffer economically. And then the rest of the world would put pressure on us to open the Straits of Hormuz or to stop the military action. So this question, and you even hear some of the bluster and bravado in a lot of the public statements that are made by the administration of like, well, if you don't, then we're going to come in there and just smash the Straits of Hormuz open. We can just take it.

That's just not real. It's not realistic at all. But I do think the Iranians, obviously they can now use this as a leverage point, which before the war they weren't doing to all the people who said we had to do the war and were better up because of the war. I'd just say, okay, what was the status? How much does it cost to trans the streets of Hormuz before the war? It costs nothing. What's it cost now? Well, it's probably to be best case on a good day, two million if it's not shut down altogether. So we are worse off now. That's just a reality that we have to live with. So I think going to the Iranians and basically saying like, look, all sanctions are off the table. We want to enable you guys to reintroduce your oil, your natural gas back to the market and help you guys get back on your feet. And then they're incentivized to keep the Straits of Hormuz open. And at the end of the day, I do think the Iranians are probably going to charge us and maybe other countries that supported this war. They're probably going to charge us tolls to transit. I think they're already letting the Iraqis and a few other countries move without paying that toll.

But I think that's just a reality we're going to have to live with. And initially, we're probably going to have to say, okay, you're going to have to say, okay, you're going to charge some fees. But once the commerce has been flowing for a little while, I do think them will have at least the credibility built up or we can get a coalition of countries to go to the Iranians diplomatically and say, hey, let's come up with a way that we can open the straits back up without charging people and exorbit about money because the insurance prices, it's going to actually hurt everybody in the long run. I think if we can just show the Iranians that we're going to be honest brokers in this whole thing and that we're not going to use this

round negotiations just to get a better military advantage later on. I think there's a lot of trade space there, not because I trust the Ayatollah or any that stuff, but because, like, actually in the long run, it's in Iran's best interest to have the Straits of Pormuz open and have sanctions off of, you know, what their number one cash producing product is, which is oil. This, however, takes us to the root of a lot of what people say, because I've made exactly those arguments or similar arguments, not exactly this argument, but I made arguments like this that discuss with the Iranians, come to the Iranians on an agreement based on their interests.

But people tell you, people tell me, well, the Iranians are not people who think in that way. They're not thinking about interests in the way that you do. They are ultimately an ideological, terrorist, expansionist, aggressive state, one which threatens Israel, one which fosters terrorism, one which is behind various acts of terrorism, including perhaps the attack on the US forces in Beirut in 1983. So people say this. Is that, well, maybe there are elements of that in Iran today, but is the actual Iran? Because I noticed you spoke about them being a pragmatic. I think that was the word that you used or maybe practical. I mean, are the Iranians actually able to think in terms of what we would call conventional national interests?

Yeah, I think so. First and foremost, I would just point to Iran's actions ever since President Trump came back into office. So when people say, like, you can't negotiate with these people, like, they're just crazed jihadists. Like, okay, well, if they are crazed jihadists, when President Trump came back into office in January, they wouldn't have shut down and restrained their proxies. Prior to President Trump coming back into office after October 7th, the Iranians knew that Biden was weak. They just did. And so they let their proxies, they enabled their proxies to attack our forces over 200 times. And we didn't really do anything about it because that was the Biden administration. Trump comes back into office. This is the Donald Trump that killed Qasem Soleani, that killed Aboumati Mahandis, that crushed the ISIS caliphate.

The Iranians respect that. It's the Middle East. Like, you've got to punch people in the nose every now and again to get hurt at the table. I think that's not just the Middle East. I kind of think that's the real world. And so the Iranians actually are like, okay, we don't want a mess of Trump. Like, let's actually negotiate with him. And so that's why we watch the Iranians observe a very, very cautious and deliberate escalatory ladder. Like, Kray's jihadists do not observe strict escalatory ladders. They behave like ISIS did. The smarter ones kind of behave like al-Qaeda did. But that is not at all how the Iranians. have behaved whatsoever. They withheld their proxies. They didn't attack us. Even during the 12-day war, when we were providing logistical support to the Israelis, the Iranians still said, you know what, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Like, well, we want to keep this fight just between us and the Israelis, even though we know the Americans are funding it. We know they're providing logistics. They technically have kind of stayed out of the fight. So they didn't attack us, even during the

12-day war. We do Operation Midnight and Hammer. What do the Iranians do? They fire an equal amount of rockets as bombs we dropped on their nuclear facilities. And they gave us a heads up and they fired it like an empty quadrant of a base in Qatar that they knew we had already emptied our troops out of. And the second they got that out of their system and said, okay, we retaliated, they were willing to go right back to the negotiating table with us. So those are not the actions of like these crazed jihadis, you know, and also like, look, the Iranians had had, under the previous Supreme Leader, had a prohibition on building a nuclear weapons since O3. And I actually had this discussion probably about a year ago, you know, with the president.

And he said, like, why don't the Iranians have a nuclear bomb? He's like, he's a smart guy. He was like the Iranians are smart people. Like, they have money. Like, why didn't they build one or buy one yet? It's like, well, because they actually realized that if they were to sprint towards getting a nuclear weapon or buying a nuclear weapon, they might get the Saddam Hussein treatment. If they came clean and said, hey, take all of our nuclear stuff, they get the Gaddafi treatment. They understand what goes on in the region.

So really, their nuclear strategy, too, is actually pretty pragmatic. It threaded the needle. It was like, hey, we've got some enrichment and we can enrich so. So we could build a bomb, but we have a prohibition on doing so. So now we can negotiate. that's been the Iranians. Every time that they've used terrorism, I'm not defending their use of terrorism. I fought the proxies.

I've had friends killed by their proxies, but they have only used it when we are actually in the Middle East. Again, they're not slapping these guys on jetliners to go flying to the World Trade Center in New York City. That's not what the Iranians have done. If we're in the Middle East and we pose a threat to them, they will use their proxies as strategic depth in the way that we use our Navy and the way that we use our Air Force. But again, like they can get those guys under control. So I disagree with the premise completely. And just look at them right now. Like, if they're crazy jihadis, why aren't they going for broke?

You know, why aren't they trying to do terrorist attacks here? Now they have the upper hand, why aren't they just making the straight-of-hormuz, like a bloodbath? Like, all of their actions are actually very pragmatic. So I think that the data just doesn't support this, like, crazed jihadi cartoon character that we've made out of them. Well, I have one very last question, which is this, which is about the whole nuclear enrichment issue. I have always got the impression that with the Iranians, they made a fundamental mistake going all the way up to 60% the enrichment. I never understood what the strategy behind that was.

It was intended to deter. It obviously didn't deter. It was intended to provoke. It absolutely did provoke. But why did they? do that? Did they ever provide the United States with any kind of coherent

explanation for it? You know, honestly, that I don't know. I think a lot of that was buried in like the Iranians are very bureaucratic. And so I think a lot of that was probably buried somewhere in the Iranian bureaucracy. And I don't

know the answer. I think this is just my opinion. I don't know. But my read of the situation would be this was an internal balancing measure between the hardliners and between the moderates. Because the moderates always knew they had to walk this line where they couldn't give up everything to the West. They couldn't let the inspectors see everything.

They couldn't completely bow. Otherwise, they'd lose all their own credibility. They'd be booted out of government completely. Then the hardliners would take over. And so I think at some point, some hardliner in a series of negotiations probably over the course of a couple months was like, okay, just keep upping the enrichment level. We'll get to 60%. that'll get us into a position where within the matter of like months,

we potentially could make a nuclear weapon. And then, you know, the moderates are probably like, okay, fine. We're still not going to make a nuclear weapon. That's our red line. But that's just my guess of the situation because I think a lot of the moderates had lost some face and were worried that someone incredibly popular and powerful, like Qasem Soleimani before we killed him, who definitely was much more hard line. And this is another thing I think that we forget in the West.

is that like the IRGC guys that are alive right now that are there probably getting more and more influence within that government, they are the students of Qasem Solemani. And Solmani was a smart guy. He was ruthless. He was a killer. But he had political ambitions. He was at some point in time probably because he was a national hero. He was going to be the next Eisenhower, MacArthur, or whatever you want to compare him to inside of Iran.

But he raised this generation of IRGC officers. So I think that's something we have to be very wary of going forward. I think that's the best explanation I've heard from anybody, by the way, of something I've never myself understood. Joe Kent, thank you for this excellent and very informative interview. I think it's explained an awful lot. I'm going to say, I actually take hope from it. I think it does suggest that, I mean, we now have this truce. I think we might say we might indeed see a way back.

So just to say thank you and thank you very much, and I hope one day you will. will be able to come and join us for another interview again. Certainly. Thank you, guys. I really appreciate it. Great traveling here. Thank you. Joe, Ken, I know you have an excellent X account, which I will put the link to in the

description box down below. And as a pinned comment, is there anything else that you would like to plug or promote where people can follow your work or is X the best place to follow you? X is the best spot. Yeah. All right. I have that link in the description box down below. Thank you very much, Mr. Joe Kent for joining us.

Thanks, guys. Take care.