The Paikin Podcast - World on Edge: Long War in Iran, Islamic Republic 2.0, and Canada’s Choices

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

Thomas Juneau joins Janice Stein to discuss the war in the Middle East, if doing nothing is an option for Canada, the diaspora politics involved, what role middle powers can play, and how Canada has been “lazy” about its national security. They also discuss the incredible pace of this war, why you cannot “bomb your way to regime change,” the incoherent strategy of this war, how the Iranian regime could become weaker but nastier, the possibility of escalation, the rising nuclear threat, and the role global oil markets played in motivating the American airstrikes. Support us: patreon.com/thepaikinpodcast Follow The Paikin Podcast: YOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/@ThePaikinPodcastSPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/1OhwznCIUEA11lZGcNIM4h?si=b5d73bc7c3a041b7X: x.com/ThePaikinPodINSTAGRAM: instagram.com/thepaikinpodcastBLUESKY: bsky.app/profile/thepaikinpodcast.bsky.social Email us at: [e-mail] 

Hi, everybody. Steve Paken here. We call this segment of the Paken podcast World on Edge, and I suspect those words have never been truer since this show was created about nine months ago than they are right now. America and Israel have attacked Iran. Iran has fired back at several countries in the Middle Eastern neighborhood, including as far away as Turkey, a NATO member, and Cyprus. Meantime, the government of Canada is still trying to determine if this country has a role to play in all of this. War in the Middle East coming right up on the Paken podcast. Happy to welcome back, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. There's Janice Stein. And this week, our special guest, Tomajuno, he is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He specializes

in the Middle East, intelligence and national security and Canadian foreign and defense policy. He's got a book out that seems very germane to what we're about to talk about today. It's called squandered opportunity, neoclassical realism, and Iranian foreign policy. And Tomah, welcome to our program. I want to put you to work right away and talk about what potential options you think Canada has right now as it relates to this war. Well, I think the first thing to say is that even if the prime minister has specified it again, I don't think there is a plausible scenario in front of us where we participate in the offensive operations alongside Israel and the U.S. against Iran. I really struggle to see how that can happen.

I think where there is room for Canada to play a small role, but a role that could be in our interest is to help a bit some of the frontline states, in particular the Gulf states. Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, in particular, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman. They are receiving hundreds, in some cases, more than a thousand Iranian drones and missiles. So far, their air defenses have performed actually quite well, and that is an important point to make. But if this war goes on for days and perhaps weeks and even more than that,

They will need support. They will need assistance in terms of intelligence, in terms of surveillance and reconnaissance and perhaps other specific capabilities. This is where Canada could have a small role to play. I mean, we've seen France and the UK do a bit at this level as well. Canada wants to deepen relations with the Gulf States. So that would be a way to help them and to win some diplomatic capital with them. Janice, what would you add in terms of a potential role for Canada?

There is no offensive military role for Canada in the Gulf. And I think the Prime Minister said that, Steve, yesterday. There was some confusion. I think there is a role for assistance, even here. Let me just elaborate a little bit on what Tammoth just said, because Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have patriotism. There are, there are not many countries that have batteries of Patriot missiles. They do.

And they have even the more advanced systems of the Fad missiles. So they really are fairly well equipped. You know, Zelensky would give his eye teeth to have those. Where the weakness is is against the thousands of Shahid drones of all different stages that Iran has and can do a lot of damage. Two of the casualties, two of the dead in the Gulf come from drones. And ironically, and it is one of the great, there are many, but this is one of the great ironic moments,

Zelensky has offered and has been asked by some of the Gulf states to provide assistance on drone interception. You know, Ukraine is, in fact, in the lead in that in the world. So why so ironic, Steve? I can't help myself. This is the part, you know, Zelensky is the line that Trump mocked and humiliated. We can all remember. And the pressure is on now.

And the allies of the United States turn to whom Zelensky. Right. Toma, I, well, let's put it this way. If you're a fan of the current prime minister of Canada, you would say his position has evolved over the last week and a half as he's tried to kind of figure out. what we should be doing. If you're not a fan of him, you'd say he's kind of flipped and flopped all over the place because he probably hasn't been sure in his own mind about what to do. My question for you is, is doing nothing an option?

Can we simply say this was not our fight? We weren't given a heads up on it. We have not asked to be a part of it. And therefore, we're going to do nothing. Well, as someone who is neither a fan or not a fan, as someone who is not partisan and doesn't have a direct fight, a direct dog in this fight, what I would say is that it's not really an option. But there's a huge caveat. The huge caveat is that so far at least, it's only words, right? Canada has only said things. We've announced the position. It's been press releases. It's been tweets. It's been statements. We have not actually done anything in terms of the substance that we've talked about in your previous two questions. questions. That's a point that is worth mentioning. And to me, there's always something a bit frustrating with Canadians, you know, in the media and opposition politicians and obviously governments as well, arguing forever about words and kind of putting aside the more important

debates about what is the substance here? What is the more substantive interest that we have to pursue? And in this case, the direct answer to your question is, in theory, Canada could have just said nothing, but that would have missed the broader point. Anytime that Canada is asked perhaps to participate in a war or not, or even if it's not direct participation, it's just taking a position. The number one variable that determines our position and eventually our contribution or not is never the war itself, whether it's Iraq 20 years ago, Afghanistan, over 20 years. It's always the U.S. It's managing our relationship with the U.S. That is our number one foreign policy priority. That was true before Trump, and it's true today. A lot has changed under Trump.

And if anything, it is even truer today because what Trump has done is made this relationship much more complicated and potentially much more costly. So to me, the logic in supporting the U.S. war on Iran, even with all the nuances, adjustments, recalibrations, whatever you want to call them, basic confusion that we saw after the first day of enthusiastic support. the whole point was to avoid angering, irritating Trump at a moment where Canada is very vulnerable. At a moment where we need over the next few months to renegotiate NAFTA or whatever you want to call it now. At a moment where a lot of our other defense and security arrangements with the U.S. are vulnerable. So did Canada win anything by supporting Trump enthusiastically or less so? No. But did we avoid a potential cost by angering Trump?

Yes. And to me, that's what matters. Janice, he hasn't asked us to do anything. So do we need to do anything. Well, let me add one thing. I think that's exactly right, Steve. We are in the countdown to a July 1 review. For the trade deal.

Yeah, that is hugely important to this country. And I agree. But I think, you know, all foreign policy in Canada is often domestic politics. And that plays here, too. It's one of those rare times where foreign policy interests lined up with domestic interests, we have a third largest Iranian diaspora in the world in this country. And the diaspora here, as many diaspras, want to see a change of regime in Iran, not at any cost, but they certainly want to see it.

that aligns with the Jewish diaspora. It's rare, but it happens. So in effect, and then if you support the Gulf, as Tom just said, if you support Gulf states, it's almost perfect in terms of diaspora politics. So you have an intersection, a vector effect here, where everything says don't get involved in a fight, provide rhetorical support.

and if the Gulf states need something that we can provide, and that's the big question mark, what can we provide this really useful? It all winds up, Steve. It's rare that happens. And we'll be back right after this. Tomai, I'd like to get the, I mean, we three obviously remember the speech that the prime minister gave in Davos in which he talked about a new world where the rules-based international order is over,

and he saw an emerging role for middle-powering, to be able to flex their muscles on the world stage. This war is more than a week and a half old now, and unless I've missed it, I have not seen a great deal of coordination among those middle powers to kind of test drive the prime minister's new international affairs theory.

Am I missing something or you tell me? I would say two things at that level. First of all, the Davos speech was a set of principles that were in some cases broad and not very clear. And I don't necessarily mean that as criticism. It's a speech, so obviously you can't go into the details. And I think it also described a very complicated world in which consequences,

meanings, guiding principles, by definition, also have to be complicated and sometimes contradict each other. One of the political consequences of that has been that a lot of different people have seen in the Davout speech what they wanted to see because the speech contained a lot of different principles that were not always coherent. From the government's perspective, I think the hope has got to be that something more comes out of the Davos speech, a national security strategy, a foreign policy, a defense policy, and so on, that will clarify a lot of these contradictions. My reading of the speech in that sense was that these contradictions in the speech were normal. They were inherent. That was kind of the point.

And that a, the, the, the, the pragmatism that the speech calls for means that you have to adjust how you apply these principles on a case by case basis. specifically on the issue of middle powers, in the best of cases, that would take time. That is not something that will be done in nine days. I'm not even sure that the best of cases will happen anyways. I think that middle powers, however you define that, are an extremely diverse bunch and have very competing in divergent interests. They have very divergent perceptions of what the post-Trumpian world means anyways. but how they will adapt to that will take time.

To me, one of the ways to join the two bits of your question here is, you know, the issue of ad hoc multilateralism moving forward. More and more, we're not going to see the broad coalitions based on shared values that we've seen in the past. To the extent that worked in the past, I think we've sometimes romanticized that quite a bit. But to the extent that it did in the past, that's kind of done or certainly will not happen as much. we will see ad hoc multilateralism, minilateralism, as some people call it, more and more. But we need to build not only the specific instances, for example, in responding to the Iran war right now, but also we need to build the culture of doing that in Canada, the habits, the traditions of doing that. And we're not there yet.

Janice, where are the middle powers? Well, you know, I'm going to come at this even more strongly than Tongbe. I think that speech was everything in it. So you pick what you want. The really important thing was when he talked, and used the term, Steve, which will perplex many of our listeners, called variable geometry. Now, what does that mean?

Okay, here's what it means. On any given issue, go find two or three partners. Not everybody, because you actually hobble yourself with a bigger of coalitions. That's, you know, that's been one of the issues for the European Union. It needs 27. Yes, it's, in order to do anything. And so variable geometry says, you want to do something, go find one or two like-minded. Do it together with them and move on.

And don't build, as Tom was just saying, complex, institutional fabrics, the secretary, it's in all that. And this aligns in a way with the way the world is right now. It's nimble. It's more flexible. And I'm struck, and I'm sure Thomas, too, I'm really struck, by the way, the speed of which this war is being fought. You know, the pace is accelerating. This is the fastest one we've seen out of the gate.

It's only 10 days old. And if you compare it even to what happened last June, which is just what, eight months ago, the pace is accelerated to an incredible degree. you can't hang around and build a coalition of lots of middle powers together. That's old. Steve, sorry, you're not cool. You're not the first person to tell me that, I can assure you. Cool. Yes, one or two other, like-minded, ready to move and move.

Well, let's just look at what Mark Carney's been doing. He recently had a meeting with the Prime Minister of Japan. He then said he had a phone call with the president of France, Emmanuel Macron. He's often, as we sit here, taping, he will soon be off to Norway and the United Kingdom. I mean, from where I'm sitting, that looks like an attempt to try to pull some middle power something together. Are my reading too much into it? No, I think you are. I think with Japan, Canada has really important interests in East Asia, both security interests, but even more important.

There's a whole series of investment opportunities. it's technology focused. And the prime minister is really focused, Steve, on attracting foreign investment to improve the productivity in this country and to make some major decisions on technology. To grow Canadian companies, let me put it in simple English. That's really good. Okay, but that's not related to the war. No, but when two prime ministers get together, that's exactly right.

They'll talk about the war, but then they'll move on to their budget. bilateral agenda. And that's fine. You can pursue your bilateral agenda. Japan is not an obvious partner for Canada in the Gulf, frankly. And that's fine. That's the whole point. The prime minister really is saying this is an era of much greater flexibility. With the United Kingdom, there clearly are overlapping interests. And the United Kingdom is already got military assets, is moved military assets to love, and if French have moved significant military assets to the Gulf, what's our problem here?

We could join. We don't have those kinds. Let me come at this issue then with Tomah from the other side of the coin, and that is earlier this week, we did an interview on this show with John Baird, the former Foreign Minister of Canada when Stephen Harper was prime minister. And John Baird said on our show, he described Iran as the greatest source of evil in the world today.

Now, if he's right, Tomah, about that, is it not Canada's obligation to take a greater role in trying to eliminate that evil? Well, first of all, I don't think Iran is the greatest source of evil in the world today. To be clear, Iran is a state supporter of terrorism. It is a major source of instability in the Middle East. It killed thousands, probably tens of thousands of its own people just two months ago to strangulate, to choke popular protests.

So it is a major source of instability. Is it the biggest one in the world? I would rank Russia and China ahead simply because of size. Iran just doesn't have the size of Russia and China. As a card-carrying realist, to me, the great powers are the ones that really matter at this level, not the regional powers. So it's not to minimize Iran's role as a source of instability. it's just to emphasize that of others.

Do we have an obligation? I think that's framing things in moral terms in many ways. And again, that is not how I would perceive things here. I think our role now is to really think in terms of our interests. What is our interest now? Our major interest, like we said a few minutes ago, is managing relations with the U.S. And that means being really careful with irritating, angering Trump. Does that mean appeasement?

No. I realize it's a fuzzy line on an issue like Denmark and Greenland. I think we took a bit of a firmer line alongside some European partners because the interest was different. Denmark and Greenland are not Iran, just to state the obvious. So I think interest number one is don't annoy the U.S. right now. And I think interest number two, absolutely, is support Gulf states who are at the front line of this war. As Janice very rightly said, there's a very limited amount of capabilities. that we have that are relevant.

You know, Janice talked a lot about Ukraine's counter drone capabilities and technologies. We are really lagging behind on counter drone technologies. And if anything, this lesson should be another slap in the face of how badly we need to invest really quickly at that level. But there are other niche capabilities that we have. We have advanced intelligence capabilities. We have people who are good at doing liaison and capability building on some front. So would it be a game changer for some of the Gulf states?

No, absolutely not. would they appreciate the diplomatic, political, but also limited material support? Yes, they would. And I think that would pay off down the road. Well, Janice, let me come at this from another angle, though, in pursuing something you just said a few moments ago, which is we have a huge diaspora community in Canada of Iranians, 100,000, I believe, in Toronto alone. And there is, you know, there's a small, but also equally engaged Jewish community in this country. And they have come together on this issue. They both want this regime out and they want Iran degraded. Does that not behoove us to do something more than what we're doing?

No. Let me make you very clear. One of the big curses for Canadian foreign policy has been to mortgage it to diaspora communities. We have more diaspora in Canada than any other country in the world. And you can't run a coherent foreign policy. Foreign Policy Canada is designed to protect and protect. promote Canadian interests, right? You don't slice and dice populations and make policy that way. You really can't see.

So I think it talked about interest. Let me talk about our incapacity. I think the criteria here for the prime minister, for anybody, and I don't think this is partisan. I can't imagine probably would be much different. Where can we be effective, right? What can we do that will make a difference, even a small difference. And that's like going to intelligence capability because we're good.

We have some good satellite intelligence, which could be helpful to the go. But if you're going to excuse me, I'm going to rant for 90 seconds. Rant away. Okay, because we have, and I've said this in public, and I'm already getting some angry pushback from people inside our government. But we've had Canadians all over the Middle East. We couldn't get a hot lineup and running. In the age of AI in advanced technology, and by the way, this is not only in the Middle East.

This happened two weeks earlier in Mexico. Where in the face of drug cartel violence that exploded in the streets, there were large numbers of Canadian tourists in Mexico. It took 45 minutes to register. on the Canadian Embassy website and people gave up. How do I know this? Because people write to me and tell me this and ask me what they should do. So how can this be?

How can this be in a G7 country? How can we use a G7 country with advanced technologies? Thomas, how can this be? Well, I would say building, answering specifically that question and some of the broader points you made. you know, for decades, Canada had it really easy. We were sitting comfortably on top of the U.S. and North America. The relationship with the U.S. was frustrating sometimes, but extraordinarily beneficial for us on the trade side, on the security and defense side. And we became complacent and lazy on the national security, defense and foreign policy front.

We neglected the capabilities. That goes on the defense side, but it also goes on the diplomatic side, on the national security side. But we also atrophied in terms of the culture, the institutions that are necessary to make this stuff work. I think tying this to the point that Janus just made about diaspora politics, we don't live in that world anymore. We don't live in the world anymore where we can afford the luxury of being complacent about these issues because now they actually matter. We don't live in the easy world that we used to.

So concretely, it means, for example, that that hijacking foreign policy on the basis of domestic, politics, whether it's diaspora lobbies or other domestic constituencies or domestic interest, is something that we could do in the past without paying much of a price, without suffering for it very much, because we just had it easy. Now I think it's really much more important than before to be much more serious about these things. And yes, diaspora politics matter. Yes, domestic politics matter because we're a democracy. So these variables should absolutely be taken into consideration,

but they shouldn't hijack the product as they did in the past. Understood. Let me bring one more issue into our discussion here, and that is what I think that, you know, it's danced around a lot, so I'm admittedly grasping its straws here. But I think the two main aims behind this war, at least as how America and Israel have stated them, is number one, prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. It looks like over the past week and a half that Israel and America have gone quite some distance to making sure that that's not an imminent threat. anymore. And the other thing they've been quite explicit about is regime change. That happened in Iraq. It took boots on the ground, but there was regime change in Iraq 20 years ago

plus. Janice, can you achieve a regime change in Iran the way they're prosecuting the war right now? No, absolutely not. Okay. And I think that's a really important point. It's really important to be honest with Canadian listeners, you do not achieve regime change from the air. You inflict a tremendous amount of damage. You can destroy civilian infrastructure, and that may well happen in terror and. But what does that do, in fact, it pushes those in the middle who want a changing regime back to supporting the regime because they are both terrified by what's how. happening in a city that is under constant bombardment and angry that their city and their institutions are being destroyed.

You cannot bomb your way to regime change. We have one example where that happened, one, and it was in a much smaller place. It was in Kosovo. That is the only time. Well, hang on. What about Japan at the end of World War II? Yeah, that was after five years of a World War and full mobilization. And two nuclear weapons.

and two new weapons. So that's just not on the cart. So that's partly why I think, frankly, the U.S. position and the position of Israel has been incoherent. Where are we now? We have allegedly a successor, and there's lots of unknowns about Mustafa al-Mahmi right now. He's clearly injured.

He's hiding. We have no idea how functional he is, but he lost his father, his mother, his wife, a brother and a son. And this happened yet again for the second time during a negotiation with the United States about nuclear weapons.

It would be very hard to persuade any Iranian to go back to the table, frankly, and try doing it with somebody who's lost their parents, a wife, a brother, and a son. We risk here, see,

dealing with a radicalized Iranian regime that is utterly given up hope on any kind of diplomacy, because it's the second time diplomacy was a shield for an attack. And it will be far easier for them to get to those 400 pounds of enriched uranium. They know where it is than it will be for anybody who comes in on the ground, whether it's special forces or anything else. I really when I look at this I say

who thought this through we have a White House that is functioning without staff who deliberately downplayed the warnings they were getting from the chief of their defense staff their chairman of the joint chiefs

Toma regime change possible for now no I would say that if the war does go on for weeks or months, the probabilities of the regime collapsing increase. But there's a huge nuance between regime collapse and regime change, because change assumes in the word that there's something that comes up. There's a change. There's something new. That's the problem. And in addition to the point about incoherence that Janice just made,

there's the point about what comes next. And this comes back to the difference between a hope and a strategy. To say that you would like the regime to fall is, again, something that I think most decent human beings should share as a hope, given the nature of this regime. But that's a hope. That's not a strategy. If the regime does fall, to be clear, its fall is not imminent.

If this war goes on for days or a small number of weeks, it will survive. It will survive in a weaker and nastier form, and that is a huge problem. And I think the strategy has not carefully thought out the implications of what a weaker a nastier Islamic Republic means for its own people, but also for the region. But if the war goes on for weeks and months, and as you said, we literally have no idea, whether it is a short-term, mid-term, or longer-term war, because President Trump, Rubio Hegsef have all contradicted each other on this one. If the war goes on for longer, the probability of the regime falling increases, there is no regime change scenario. There is only a regime collapse scenario. And what that means is that at some point,

yes, the collapse of the regime becomes a possibility, full or partial collapse and we can get into a lot of sub scenarios in this discussion. The problem is that there is no alternative to this regime that is ready to take over. There is no alternative inside Iran. There's no alternative outside Iran. There is no democratic alternative. There's no undemocratic alternative. There is no opposition that is remotely close to being strong and unified enough to take over, not just on the day after. This notion of a day after is always a bit of a fantasy on the month after or the week after. And that, you don't think the Shah's son is an option?

The Shah's son is absolutely not an option. He is popular in a lot of segments of the diaspora. His, you know, his popularity inside the country has increased a bit. He is extremely contested. He, especially among the 45-ish percent or so of Iranians who are minorities, among left-wing Iranians, he is highly contested. He has absolutely not shown that he is a strong, charismatic, capable, intelligent, well-organized leader.

So no, he is not an option. And he has consistently broken any prospects of creating a unified opposition. He and his partisans in particular. So all that to say, if we do get into regime collapse territory, which we are not there yet. But if this goes on for a while, we do get there. The situation becomes extremely worrying for Iranians, who have suffered tremendously for 47 years, but also for the region. because regime collapse with no regime change scenarios imply prolonged, prolonged instability and chaos in Iran,

a country of 90 million, awash with weapons on top of the Persian Gulf, etc., etc. And let me add one more complications to this picture, Steve, which we haven't really talked about yet. And here we're in the realm of speculation. I have to say the Saudis are furious at these attacks, literally furious. And the Saudi position is really ambiguous in all honesty because publicly they were really hard to improve their relationship with Iran. They said publicly they didn't want a war. But from everything I understand, Mohammed bin Salman did the thing most likely to start

this war, which is he taunted Donald Trump repeatedly in phone calls and told him that he would look weak if he didn't attack. Right. Well, here we are, and the Saudis are now on the receiving end of missiles and drones. There is a matter of what in the Saudi world you would call face, honor. And there's a limited amount of attacks that the Saudi regime will absorb. It's possible they could be drawn into this as well. and talk about something that would escalate because people talk about a regional war, but it's one way war

because the Gulf is actually simply defending itself right now. But we can't take for granted that that is a permanent situation. And if this continues, and I don't think that's a matter. I think if you listen to what the Saudis are saying, if you pay attention to their media, they are really outraged. by these attacks. Interesting. One of the things that we've done on this show is that we have kind of put the word out to create a bit of a community on Patreon. And if you join Patreon,

one of the things you get to do is suggest questions to our guests. And we have a friend named Trajan Lee who is suggesting the following question, and I'd like you two to tackle it. Here's this question. He says, while I don't believe Trump is invading Iran to blatantly steal their oil. I know that Middle East tensions tend to raise global oil prices, and we've certainly seen that. The U.S. is a major oil producer, and the rising prices could help the Trump administration raise its revenue in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on tariffs and the possible importer lawsuits that could follow. I'm sure that the motivations are very multifaceted, but could you ask your experts on how plausible it is that this factored into the decision? Janice, then

Tomah. I wouldn't rule it out, in all honesty. It's very, you know, it's ironic again. In 2003, when George Bush attacked Iraq, everybody said, oh, it's about oil. It really wasn't. It was not about oil. With this president, I think there's a more plausible case to make for this. You look at his performance in Venezuela.

It was about managing. oil. It's not, it's about orchestrating the oil market. You know, Iran's oil is, it's not what it used to be, let me put it that way, but we're still talking about 20 to 30 percent of international oil supplies that go through the Gulf and having a regime in Iran that would work with the United States. You know, I think there was discussion. I wasn't Washington. when this was before all the decision was making, there was a kind of discussion, who's the Dulcy Rodriguez of Iran?

The sort of second in command waiting to take over. And you know, when I heard that question, I thought, oh, my God, people don't know anything about Iran if they can ask the question that way. So I wouldn't discount entirely that they had a very badly oversimple. thought view and could fantasize about orchestrating global oil markets in ways that would benefit. Toma, what say you? I would agree first with a point in the question and a point that Janice just mentioned.

First of all, I think the question was right to highlight that the answer to the question of the why is multifaceted and a complex. Whenever somebody tries to reduce a war to a single, easy explanation, in the vast majority of cases, whether it's with my students in class or elsewhere, I will say, no, it's complicated, right? So I think that's a key point to make. The second point to make is I think Janice is right to mention that from the growing amount of information that we're seeing in American media, there is a bad amount of oversimplification and just wrong assumptions that are guiding American thinking on a number of issues on this war, which shouldn't be surprising given the fact

that Trump has surrounded himself with obsequious yes men who will not challenge him on many of these wrong assumptions. Specifically on the question, I'm not an economist, right? So it's difficult for me to tackle some of the aspects of that question. But my reading of the domestic political situation in the U.S. right now is that the longer this war goes on, the more oil prices will rise, and the more that will be a political problem for Trump and Republicans, when we are about eight months away from midterm elections, that risk, eight months, a lot can happen, but that risk damaging the Republican standing, perhaps losing their very narrow majority

in the House of Representatives. Their slightly less narrow majority in the Senate seems to be safer, but even that is not completely safe. So my reading of the situation now is that from the oil and oil price angle, the net benefit is negative for the Trump administration,

the longer this goes on. Gotcha. Okay, Trajan, thank you for that question. And we've got one more here from someone named Larry Emma Mory, who asks, why is there a double standard with the larger nations in the so-called Western Alliance when they, U.S., Israel, primarily, say any other country must not be permitted to have or build up nuclear weapons, but they can. May I say that the U.S. president is much more dangerous to the world in control of any nuclear weapons?

This discussion never seems to take place. Just wondering, says Larry. Okay, Toma, why don't you go first on this one? Well, I think we could go on for an entire show just on that one. And I think there are some valid points to make. But first of all, you know, we referred to the Davos speech by Prime Minister Carney a few minutes ago. One of the takeaways of that speech was the hypocrisy and very partial, you know, the fact that what we call the rules-based international order was always very incomplete, very partial. And really it was rules-based to our interest, us being the U.S.

and US allies. If you talk about even before Trump, the notion of a rules-based international order to a lot of people in the Middle East, the region I follow, but my understanding is that my colleagues who study Africa or Latin America would say the same thing,

that that notion of a rules-based international order was always perceived as a hypocrisy and, you know, in less technical terms, a bit of a joke to at least some extent. So I think that that's the broader context that matters. I do think at the same time, though, with points taken about the, unpredictability and danger that Trump poses. I'm fully on board with that. I'm not a fan at all,

just to really clear that one. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a major source of instability. It supports terrorist groups against Israel, but against others as well. It exports instability, and it has done that for decades. It kills its own population in very large numbers. It has fueled, fed civil wars in Syria, in Yemen, elsewhere in the region. And the list goes on. So to me, even in a functional rules-based international order, you don't want the Islamic Republic of Iran to have nuclear weapons. You also should, I would say, support policies that aim to contain the Islamic Republic of Iran, rules-based or not. The issue, though, is whether the current war is a smart way of doing that. And that's where I become quite skeptical, to say the least.

Janice, how come Israel's allowed to have nukes, but nobody else in the region is? So history matters. And it does. We never start some scratch, Steve. And Israel began its nuclear program in the early 60s with a cooperation of the French. JFK did everything he could to stop it. He really did. And the relationship between Israel and the United States in the early 60s was not what it is today.

It was not the kind of dependence on the United States. It was actually on France. The relationship with France was the court. And he failed to stop it. And we failed. But there has always been an overwhelming American role in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Because it was felt rightly, I think, that the spread of nuclear weapons to larger and larger numbers of states. And JFK was the one who were difficult.

that there would be 25 or 30 nuclear states. He was dismayed at his failure to stop the Israelis. In fact, we only have four, Israel, Indian Pakistan, and we played a small part in that when we didn't control technology as well as we should have, and of course North Korea. And then that's it. So the interesting thing is Russia and China and the United States. are agreed on this.

They're written on two things, and this is nothing to do with fairness. One, no nuclear weapon states. We do not want this. It's dangerous. But, oh, by the way, we're allowed to build up our forces. And we're in a period like that now, between the United States and Russia, all the treaties are gone. And we're actually in a very dangerous point right now because the Chinese are aggressively

building their nuclear weapons. And it's very tough in a triad to build what you think is a survivable nuclear force when you have to do that, assuming an attack by two others. So it's a very dangerous moment in history of nuclear weapons, but there is a great power consensus. Nobody else gets them. The worst thing to do is to obviously go for a nuclear weapon because you make your nuclear weapon. Because you make yourself a target. So Thomas' comment, what comes out of this? Just think about this for a minute.

An embittered, angry, radicalized leader who saw his family wiped out, who was put in place by the Revolutionary Guards. Because that's why he was chosen. Who knows where that enriched uranium is? Because they do know. There's all kinds of theories about where it is. It's hard to know, and we don't have access to class of it. But they know that day it stopped, wouldn't you be motivated to build a bomb or a dirty bomb, given what your country has just gone through?

That's what I think each of us meant in different ways when we said this was not thought through. Talk about a world on edge. Larry, thank you for the question, and thank you, too, for those answers to those questions. And let me just make a few points here before we close this thing out. I mentioned we are creating a bit of a community on Patreon right now. And if you go to patreon.com forward slash the Paken podcast, you can put questions that you'd like us to put to the guests. You can suggest guests as well.

In addition, we've got some web-exclusive video there. And I did something last week with City Post magazines, where we had a discussion at the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto, Nine housing experts on what's going on in the housing sector these days, and whether you, Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, millennials are ever going to be able to afford a house in any big city in this country ever again. We've kicked around a lot of good ideas.

And if you want to hear that discussion, it's on our Patreon page right now, but you've got to join in order to watch it. We do support those. We are grateful for the support of those who have decided to help us out. Keep the lights on. We're trying new things all the time on this show. Kevin Goodale, thank you for joining our Patreon community. Celia Lau, thanks to you.

Mike Wiles, thanks to you. Rohan Kalianpur. Malcolm Anderson, thanks to you. Fred Hacker, who I've known for a long time. He's a broadcaster up in Midland. Thanks to you, Fred. Conway Fraser, allegedly is a buddy of mine, originally from Sudbury, now lives down in southern Ontario.

And he says, I've supported many lost causes in my time. This is not one of them. The man, I think he means me, has a voice built for radio and a face that, against all odds, survives the camera. I paid gladly. Jeez, Conway, thanks so much for that. You're such a pal. And one more thank you out to Davin Bajolski, who's one of the best hockey players I know. Commissioner, we love the fact you're supporting this show, and he also likes the sign-off.

So stick around for the sign-off. That is still to come. Once again, patreon.com forward slash the Paken podcast. All of these shows are archived. stevepaken.com. Tomajuno, Janice Stein, great to be with you this week on the Paken podcast, and to everybody else we say, peace and love, everyone.