The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Israel and Iran Avoid War...For Now || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

Tensions between Israel and Iran have been escalating since the Hamas attacks in October, but are we going to see a full blown war between these two adversaries? Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/israel-and-iran-avoid-warfor-now

Everybody, Peter Zion here. I come to you from Colorado. We're going to close the loop on what's going on with Israel and Iran. In the aftermath of the Hamas attacks in October, the Iranians were needling Israel in order to just get some good PR in the Arab world and back home. Of course, the Israelis were a little sensitive about that, about everything at the moment. And so when the Iranians got a little bit too punchy,

the Israelis slapped them down by bombing the Iranian consulate in Damascus and killing a large number of high-ranking leadership for the IRAGC. That's their Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, which carries out a lot of the clear military operations in Syria and Lebanon and interfaces with Hezbollah. Basically, Israel took out the entire leadership. Iran couldn't believe they went after diplomatic grounds to do it. So, you know, anyway, Iran was like, wow, wow, okay, they're a little. sensitive right now. We need to dial this back because we were just having some fun, and clearly they're treating this a lot more serious than we are. So they sent all these missiles and drones and artillery rockets into Israel as retaliation, but they telegraphed

their attack days ahead and actually provided the technical specs to the Swiss Embassy, which passed it on to the United States so that the U.S. and the Brits and the Jordanians and the Israelis could basically just light it all up and shoot them down one after the other, and no one was hurt. and no meaningful damage was done. The question then was what's next? Because the Americans were like, hey, hey, yeah, this is great. This is a great climb down. You get a claim face.

We get to say coalition is working. The Israelis get to say that their ironedome. Missile defense works great. Everybody wins. The only potential flying the ointment is looking at Israel. Are you okay? And Israel decided it mostly was. So what happened this last Friday is Israel did a counter-strilege.

on Iran, but the only thing that they took out was the air defense at a very specific military facility in Ishfahan. It just happens that military facility in Ishfahan was right next to the primary Iranian nuclear research facility. So basically, the Iranians, like, yes, we're not bros, but we're cool for now, but just to underline the fact that we could have done so much more, even without any help from the United States. So at the moment, everyone is backing off, and at the moment it seems that no one in the Middle East is interested in a broader conflict, with the exception, of course, of the Russians who would love it as a distraction.