The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: US warships move into the Middle East and does Canada need to pick a trade lane?

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Rudyard and Janice begin today's show with the dangerous escalation between Iran and America. Trump has moved an Armada into the Middle East following his demands that Iran cease enrichment of uranium and limit its ballistic missile program. Will Trump use force if Iran does not comply? And what are the targets? Turkey and Qatar are trying to broker an agreement but the Ayatollah, a fervent idealogue, does not want a deal. This is a very dangerous situation that could easily escalate without a clear plan. In the second half of the program they discuss the fallout from Mark Carney's Davos speech and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer's suggestion of a North America customs union. This would build a wall of tariffs around the continent and lead to much deeper integration with the U.S., in opposition to Carney's plans for trade diversification. Why would America want this? And will Trump stoke the flames of Alberta separatism to influence upcoming trade negotiations?Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We've seen this before. When you move an aircraft carrier, three destroyers, fighter aircraft F-15 are positioned in Jordan, at some point you lose it or use it. And that's what happened to it as well. And so this is a serious sign that he is thinking really hard about using force with unclear targets. Welcome to Friday Focus for the 30th of January 2025. I'm Reddy Griffith's chair of the Monk Debates in studio with my co-host, Janice Gross Stein for the Monk School. Reddy and I'm glad to see this month end. May the snow melt.

May the temperature go up. I wish that for all Canadians eat and the skiers will forgive me. Yes, well, we haven't sent the Army in yet in Toronto, but this snow is going to stick around for a while. minus 23 this morning, Friday, as we record our weekly podcast together. Let's begin the show by jumping over to the Middle East. Janus is an area of expertise of yours. We have what seems to be a worsening situation vis-à-vis the Trump administration,

requesting that Iran not only cease and stop nuclear enrichment, but effectively abolish its missile program, the threat that it represents, along with funding so-called proxies in the region. The Iranian government up until this point does not seem willing to concede on the missile program. There's some indication they might be willing to make a deal on enrichment, but they're drawing the line on this critical, what I guess they would see, Janice, as their big offensive capability. It is really tense moment, Roger.

the fact that the whole Trump has said he has an armada there. We've seen this before. When you move an aircraft carrier, three destroyers, fighter aircraft F-15 are positioned in Jordan, at some point you lose it or use it, and that's what happened to Venezuela. And so this is a serious sign that he is thinking really hard about using force with unclear targets.

and not really matters. Who's the target here? Is it to take out the senior leadership with precision strikes? Well, Ayatollah Khomeini is already hit an underground bunker. Is it to hit the Republican guards? Well, what does that accomplish? There's always more behind. So very unclear targets.

Secondly, there are a whole bunch of mediators in there right now, trying desperately to get a deal so that military action is, avoided one Oman and Qatar have put a so-called 20-point deal on the table. That's a coincidence that we've got a 20-point deal. And Turkey, Erdogan, is heavily involved in trying to broker some kind of arrangement. Who's blocking any deal on the Iranian side right now? The Ayatoll himself, absolutely opposed. He is ideological, sees himself as the son of the revolution, and frankly, he says he says, I would rather die as a martyr than compromise.

So it's a very, very dangerous situation. Different messages out of the president of administration, you know, some saying this is about, particularly about the ballistic missile. program, which supposedly has been rebuilt almost in entirety from the attacks that it suffered. What was that last spring? Last June, yeah. When Israel went after basically a lot of the missile and early morning systems in Iran. But then there's also seemingly, out of the president, a desire for regime change, that there's discussion.

Again, this is all being filtered through various sources, so you don't know how much of it is, is in a sense, negotiating tactic itself. But the idea that it would be better, a la Venezuela, to remove Khomeini in the same way that Maduro was removed so that somebody else comes up, maybe even from the Revolutionary Guard, who is more pliable,

more open maybe to instruction from Turkey or from Qatar, the traditional allies of the Iranian regime. What do you make of that estimation of, it seems to me like, you know, a bank shot off a whatever, you know, some weird thing in Snooker where you have like a one and a hundred chance of making it. That's exactly what it is. You know, we do know something about the Republican Guard. There are, you know, this group of experts who study it. Here's the interesting thing. The older Ayatoll is leaving aside right now, Chamin, because he's going to use, are, and, you know,

these words are so misleading, but are more open to compromise. The younger ones, they're like Gen Xers all over the world, are less willing to compromise, more activists, more committed to supporting proxies all over the region. Be very careful what you wish for here, right? No outsider can control what happens inside the Republican Guard.

Who's going to have the support and military support, frankly, to cow his colleagues and push claw their way to the top here. This is gambling of the worst kind. It's exactly, as you said, it's a shot off the edge and nobody knows where that's going to land. This is not precision. And anybody who talks that language simply doesn't know enough about Iran. And I'm worried that that's the case in Washington right now.

Iran most recently was a subject of large-scale protests. There I think is increasingly credible information that possibly tens of thousands of people were killed by the regime horrible stories of regime militias going into hospitals, shooting people with, you know, coup de grace on medical beds. There's now reports that doctors who had treated patients, some of them outside of the hospital system, because people were so terrified to seek medical care are now being arrested and threatened with executions. Just what happens in a regime when you rip the veil off when, you know, the Iranian government spent decades trying to create some simulation of legitimacy on the part of ruling over a people that they, you know, asserted to some degree supported, not all of them, but some of them, their goals and objectives. and now you've killed maybe upwards of 30,000 of your own citizens.

Many young people shot dead in many cases, again, in the street, in the most indiscriminate way, by your security forces. I mean, where is that regime at? It sounds like it's kind of joined North Korea in that very small and odious club of a full-on pariah states. I think there's no question. Right. That's correct. Right now, as we're doing this, there is a wave, a large one, a preemptive arrest.

So they have visual identification of the people that were in the streets in anticipation that the fight could break out with the United States. They are arresting hundreds, if not thousands of people, putting them, they don't have enough room in prison for the number of people. So they're putting them in warehouses and pushing the, judiciary to process these people. So when you think about the number who are killed and arrested,

it's massive. This regime has lost any legitimacy it had. You can't restore it. There's no going back after what, and by the way, it's the Ayatollah himself on that Thursday, issued

the order to kill, regard, and use any means. So this is traceable directly to him. Were you surprised, though, because I guess I always wonder, how does a regime have so many people who are willing to kill basically their neighbor's sons and daughters? I mean, this was happening in small cities and towns across Iran, not just Tehran. What is that? I mean, is this a more fanatical regime maybe than I thought that there are believers here?

This was the line of Benjamin Netanyahu, that this is a genuinely dangerous regime because there is a fanaticism here that goes beyond. It is more North Korean than, you know, the garden variety authoritarian-type state. And just how do you have security forces that the descriptions are just horrible? You know, men in burkas dressed in disguise with guns with silencers walking into crowds and just indiscriminately shooting people in the genitals, in the neck and face with pellet guns. I mean, just the most horrific, cruel, barbarous behavior. The video that says my mind, but I do thought I've watched them, which not good fear men don't have, are some Republican guards on a flat roof with assault rifles firing randomly into a crowd,

and you just see people falling one after the other. There's no constraint. So what explains this? I'm not sure it's ideology in this case so much as it is money. The Republican guards run the economy of Iran. They benefit from sanctions, okay, because you have a monopoly. When you sanction stuff and nothing can come into the country, those who can bring things into the country, frankly through corruption, really benefit.

And the Republican guards, the estimates are they control anywhere between. 60 and 75% of the Iranian economy. So what's bad for the Iranian economy is good for the Republican guards. That's why we're where we are. So they have everything at stake here. If this regime is overthrown, they lose everything, everything.

They have nowhere to go, and they lose everything. That's a big part of it, and that's a big part of other places in the world why we haven't seen anything like this, frankly, in a very, very, very long time. It's singularly horrible. But, you know, the Egyptian military, to compare for a second, they had a president, one of theirs, who was in power,

Mubarak, well, they were pretty confident. Okay, those guys lost it. Crowd wants them out. We're not firing on the crowd because there's tomorrow. And they were right. And they kept their relationship with the Egyptian people. people. That's not the case here. No, it's become a terrorist state.

Yeah, against its own people. You know, the people- Like Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 30s. In the purges, right? Yeah. Except that, at least you weren't killing people up close in the way that this regime is. And how they thought that by shutting down the internet, you know, first of all, it wouldn't, the news wouldn't spread in Iran,

and that it wouldn't come out as soon as the internet, reopen. Well, they're not reopening it. It's a bizarre scenario. They're allowing some trusted people access and everyone else gets a state version of the internet and they're going around

searching for Starlink and other non-sanctions and arresting and disappearing those people too. And let's just have two flashpoints to all of this. I mean it's this is a Tinderbox ready to explore. No question. One is that there are

There's a tradition in Shia Islam that 40 days after someone dies, you have big memorial services. People gather. We're coming up on that. The regime does not want anybody in the streets. There's effectively a curfew in martial law. And then there's Naurus, which is Persian New Year. Again, so they are trying not to open the Internet until Nauru's. over because they're so terrified of having any group,

no matter small congregate in the streets right now, how Donald Trump thinks of firing missiles into the middle of this is gonna help anybody. And again, we're dealing with a group of desperadoes now. That's how I think about that. If there's a strike by the United States, why wouldn't these guys unleash what they have in the region. Because again, they have nothing to lose. This is it for this regime.

Well, let's end this segment on Israel, because Israel is making active preparations on the basis that they would be the subject of a strike. The Republican Guard has threatened direct missile attacks on Tel Aviv, on the center of Israel's largest city. What do you make of these threats? I mean, the last two times that Iran has tried to do this, it's been a bit of a time. I've been a bit of dud. I mean, there were, on the second attack, we don't know, because of intelligence and other blackouts. I mean, there were clearly some strikes. But the reality was the threat compared to the results. This, again, once again, was another kind of, in a way, failure of Iranian deterrence. And I presume that Iran will lose control of its skies in a matter of hours under a combined

Israel-U.S. assault. So let's go back on what's in the region right now, those federal aircraft are deployed in Jordan because Israel dependent not only on itself and its own missile shields, it depended on others. It got help from the Jordanians who explained to their own people they're doing this because the missiles are flying over Jordanians guys, which is true, but the Saudis help the Jordanians and the Americans out. So part of what you're seeing is a rebuilding of that network to shoot down. Second, the thing in June, which was the third missile attack, there was much more damage and people were killed. Some 30,000 were displaced. There were, from everything we know several. There was at least a thousand killed. And so this is not minor. This is not a

pin-brick attack. And they would do their worst this time. So what's really going to count here? registered missile interceptors. In June, they ran out. That's partly why it ended. They ran out. Think of the cost, okay. For every missile you take out, depending on what you use, it's a three-to-one cost to defend.

So it's very expensive to produce the interceptors and much cheaper to make the missiles. The Iranians can do that at home. Of course, they were able to rebuild. the United States doesn't have a huge stockpile. The whole calculus will depend here on how many interceptors they can put in the region. That's going to determine. And there's noise out of Israel about a preemptive strike.

That would be just a catastrophe, frankly. And the talk is if they're going to do it, we're going to do it first. So we take out their anti-aircraft missiles, we try to damage missile sites before they can fire them. And you know, if you're thinking only in military terms, you can make the military terms, that argument. But this is not about that. This is about politics all the way down. Does this regime survive? And if it doesn't, who takes over? What's next? You know, there's an elegant four-letter word, which I can't use on here. This is a turkey shoot, frankly. Nobody knows. Yeah.

Well, Jess, let's say goodbye to our complimentary listeners and viewers. Join our monk donors on the other second side of Friday Focus. They get the show 72 hours in advance the rest of our audience. So get caught up on all the latest and greatest international news and events. We're going to shift back to Canada, Rocky Week, on the trade front with the United States. A lot of barbs being thrown by the president

and the administration. We'll break that all down with Janice after the short break. Thank you for listening to the first half of the Friday Focus podcast. To get access to the full episode right now, become a monk donor. You can do that for just $50 a year. That's less than a week. You also get advanced access to full-length editions of our weekly monk dialogues with Andrew Coyne, exclusive live streams of our main stage debates and all kinds of other great perks and privileges. Simply go to our website, triplew.munkdebates.com. That's MUNK, debates with an

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