Ceasefire Reality: The ceasefire is fragile, with continued regional strikes and risks around the Strait of Hormuz that markets may be underpricing.
Energy Infrastructure: Attacks on Iran’s energy facilities and Saudi’s East-West pipeline, plus potential tanker interdictions, highlight chokepoint vulnerability and shipping risk.
Defense Posture: GCC states are likely to accelerate defense spending (air defenses, jets, anti-drone tech), increasingly from non-US suppliers, benefiting the broader Aerospace & Defense complex.
China’s Role: China is pushing de-escalation to restore oil flows; Asia is already feeling pain via higher jet fuel and emerging energy rationing.
Asymmetric Threats: Iran’s drones and missiles have proven cost-effective against expensive Western systems, sustaining a stalemate and elevating Drone Warfare relevance.
Oil Market Risks: Oil prices could spike if developed markets initiate rationing; current pricing assumes a short conflict that may not materialize.
Maritime Exposure: Tanker traffic and potential blockades place the Marine and Oil & Gas Storage & Transportation segments in focus.
No Single-Stock Pitch: No specific tickers were recommended; the discussion centers on sector-level exposures in Energy and Defense.
Transcript
and we should be live. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Tagert, welcoming you here for yet another special report on the situation in Iran. We got a lot to talk about today and we're joined as usual by Rain M East geopolitical strategist Ryan B. Ryan, thanks so much for joining us again today. I'm sure this has got to be another crazy week for you. >> Yeah, absolutely. and and last night was another turnabout of of this dynamic and uh it's certainly not over uh this morning. >> Okay. So yeah, when I reached out to uh schedule this with you, we were facing the ticking clock of the President Trump's uh you know, deadline basically. Hey, you know, come to the table or else uh we're going to unleash hell on Iran. Um fortunately, we now have a ceasefire. Um we'll see how long it holds. Um but I guess let's let's start with this. Um what do we know so far about the ceasefire? What should we expect from it? And um do you personally expect it to hold? >> So the only part of the ceasefire that seems to be holding right now is the US not conducting air strikes on Iran. We've already seen in the past 12 hours uh yeah I think it is been about the past 12 hours uh Israeli escalation against Lebanon Hezbollah. Uh there have been strikes inside of Iran on Iranian uh energy facilities. There have been Iranian retaliation against Kuwait, Bahrain, and then most recently that critical east west pipeline in Saudi Arabia to uh between the eastern province and Yamu on the Red Sea uh has also been attacked. Um, and I I think I did mention the Emiradis have been attacked and the and the uh uh Iranian state media has said that Hormuz was open for about 10 minutes uh and that they've closed it again uh because of Israeli aggression within Lebanon. Um it doesn't look like the markets have have kind of internalized this news. What they're looking at is the ceasefire process and the diplomatic process going forward. Um this is extremely untenable. What's what's currently happening? The Iranians came up with a 15-point ceasefire plan that they sent to the Americans and Trump said, "We can work with this." Even though all of their demands were non-starters for the Americans. And >> just to be clear, theirs is theirs is 10 points, right? Ours is the 15. >> Yes, that's right. Ours is. Well, the issue is right now, we don't know on the Iranian side, are they sticking with their 10 to 15 points officially in Islamabad when the talks begin? Uh because it is entirely possible that the delegation that goes to Islamabad on Friday comes with new demands, older demands. We know some of their core demands are things like uh uranium enrichment, probable control of the straight of Hormuz, the end of Israeli attacks on their proxies, and of course a durable ceasefire uh with the US and Israel that guarantees that there's no future war. Um so what the number of points perhaps doesn't matter as much as the the bigger substance of what the Iranians are trying to get out of this, which is full-scale security on the energy front, on the economic front, the nuclear front, and of course physical security. Um, and it doesn't look like right now they believe they had need to offer any concessions and and for that matter the Americans under the Trump administration believe that their uh, you know, ceasefire demands are are at least going to be discussed and met in some capacity in Islamabad. Um, and it doesn't there doesn't seem to be any reason for this optimism other than the fact that it's it's largely aspirational ceasefire dynamics is the way I would describe it is that the Trump administration decided to pause whatever shock and awe campaign that they had planned to start last night and they still plan to to uh carry out in the next few days if Islamabad doesn't go well. Um that seems to be the only thing that's been halted on this because on every other front the war is continuing relatively the same way it was uh on Monday and Tuesday. >> Okay. Um real quick, when are the Salamabad talks supposed to start? >> Supposed to be on Friday. Uh we're getting lots of leaks as to who may or may not go, which tells us how serious these talks are. There's rumors that the uh Iranian parliamentary speaker uh will be going and he's he's a guy who's attached to the IRGC but isn't exactly in charge of it. It may be a lower level designation because they're worried about Israeli assassinations if they decide to leave the country or travel. >> Um so who goes to Islamabad will matter. Uh the other or the other on the American side is is the rumors that it'll be either be JD Vance, uh Steve Whit or or Jared Kushner. Now, if it's WhitF and Kushner, the Iranians don't trust them because they've done several rounds of talk to these guys and it's resulted in war. JD Vance is supposed to be a dove in comparison to the rest of the administration. Um, and there is some signs the Iranians may be willing to trust him a bit more. But for that matter, Vance may end up going to these talks and then concluding that the Iranians are playing more games and having to come back and resume the war. And that's going to damage his dent uh his his dovish reputation that he's kind of counting on for 2028. So, nothing is firm yet. We have to keep a really close eye on who's going to understand how serious these talks are. or is this a traditional Middle Eastern ceasefire process that is the worst escalations are contained but the war is put into a box that allows the combatants to kind of fight each other to a stalemate. >> Okay. Um All right. Uh so I mean it's super early in the ceasefire right now and one could make the argument look it's going to take a day or two for everybody to get the memo that there's a ceasefire probably especially in Iran where the communications have been compromised and stuff like that but it doesn't to the toe I'm getting from you is it's not just guys that haven't gotten the memo yet it's it's active uh intent on both sides to to still be hitting each other. >> Yeah. And with the exception again of the Americans holding off for now. Uh how long that's going to last, I don't know. I have seen evidence that the US is still rushing in KC7 tankers and and there's an artillery brigade that's being sent out to the Middle East as well. So there are still troops being sent and and assets being sent. It is also entirely possible that what the Trump administration really wanted from this two-week ceasefire is to build up assets for a more thorough shock and a hall campaign because they have used up a lot of their assets. The F-15 shootown was an indication that the current assets are getting worn out and are starting to make mistakes. So they they may have needed a tactical pause to make the shock and awe campaign threat credible. After all, I'd never considered that Trump would actually drop a nuclear weapon on Iran. There's just no rationality behind that even for him. And of course in the first term he threatened to nuke uh North Korea more or less every other week if we recall in 2017 and 2018 that was all part of his rhetorical madmen political strategy. He's very comfortable making those sorts of threats. Um and it's important to note that with North Korea the outcome of that was just the status quo ante. All he got was a photo op out of the North Koreans, but he certainly didn't denuclearize them and he didn't get sanctions relief. But he seems to believe it was a successful political strategy and uh he seems to be trying it again with the Iranians. >> Okay, I got a ton of questions for you, but let me just address this one that someone just asked. Where's this guy get his info? Um, so h, you know, how are you keeping as up to date on this as you are as a M East analyst? >> So, uh, I'm an open source intelligence analyst. That's that's my, uh, my base role. in addition to the the geopolitical forecasting that my organization does and that I take part in which includes scenario building. Um again we were we were trained by intelligence community folks to to do this kind of work but most of our information comes from the same sources that you all can grab uh from the open source uh networks that exist uh social media traditional media you know your Reuters and associated presses New York Times and of course Iranian state media right now actually does have relevancy normally you don't necessarily look at Tasmin uh to to try to figure out what Iran's next moves are but if we were to understand if they said yes to this ceasefire we needed to start reading that as well. So you've got to go to your primary sources in some cases. Uh and you have to have the intelligence training to kind of discern signal versus noise. You don't always get it right. Neither does CIA or MI6. Um but those are the jobs that you basically have to do is is ascertain signal versus noise uh through these many different sources. >> All right. Does rain have in region sources or in uh administration or in military you know US military sources as well? >> Uh one of our guys is you know one of our analysts is based in Lebanon. uh he is currently watching the air strikes outside of his window. So we and we have some sales people and business people in the Gulf Arab states um and I have lots of contacts with journalists uh you know when I do my outreach stuff you know through Bloomberg, CNBC, TRT World, Alzer etc. So I keep in contact with a lot of those folks but again they usually don't say things that aren't already being said in public and or aren't being published by themselves. Um so it's not secret networks so to speak. um that's not as effective for a private organization as it used to be when uh people are able to publish on to X or Blue Sky or or any or leaked to the New York Times and get their voice out there at a much wider audience a lot faster. >> Okay. All right. So, uh let's get into this. So you you had said that the 10 points uh that the Iranian regime has put out uh that they want are kind of non-starters. And that was my I'm not a professional analyst like you, but that that was sort of my initial interpretation is like I can't believe that Trump would agree to any of these. Now in his recent treat social post, Trump did say, "Oh, we think this is a a basis for a framework to to to you for discussion going forward." A little surprised by that, but who knows? Maybe he's just being time, buying time and saying, "Hey, we'll all get in a room and see what happens, right?" Um, what's been uh talked about a lot this morning and again on truth by Trump uh has been the uranium part, right? So when you look at what the the administration has said sort of four main military objectives were, and if I'm doing this from memory, but number one was prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon. Number two was, you know, um, you know, basically degrade their ballistics capabilities, degrade their ability to make more ballistics, and then I think the other one was like render their air force and navy inoperative, something like that. And and they pretty much done those those last three, the nuclear one is the big question, right? And then Trump was referring to the dust in his most recent uh truth post basically kind of giving the impression that the 450 kg or whatever of enriched uranium that Iran supposedly has is not in some you know some bunker that the Iranians are guarding. it's, you know, basically under the rubble of what was blown up during mid Operation Midnight Hammer and that the US with the Iranians will go in at some point in the future collectively get it and presumably the US will extract it and and take it out of Iran. >> A, is that your best understanding of what's going on? and and B, you know, what what because this whole thing sort of seemed to have started around concerns around Iran eventually getting to a nuke. Do you see the US as actually being able to credibly get to a point where it can say, "Yes, we took Iran's enriched uranium away." >> Uh, I don't think that there's there's a a viable path to do that at the moment. The the Islamic Republic isn't going to give up its enriched uranium, whether it's buried or dispersed or in new secret sites. And remember, part of the reason Trump says these things is this is what his intelligence uh folks are telling him. This is where we think that these things are. But to verify the actual location of the uranium requires on the ground uh deep inspections that they they aren't able to do. They there's MSAD and CIA running all over Iran right now. That doesn't mean they can dig down deep into the ground to discover where this enriched Iranian is. This is based on an assumption that it was buried and that it wasn't moved out to other locations and that the Iranians don't necessarily have other secret locations. So, it's not clean assumptions that even if you can get to these these areas that they know uh that that's all of Iran Iran's stockpile or that that will permanently take it away. It also requires we saw this F-15 uh operation to get the airmen out. Very impressive from a tactical standpoint. They still lost significant amounts of equipment, but they didn't lose any lives, and they did achieve their objective. To do this with the enriched uranium under fire strikes me as physically impossible. Uh it would require for the US to take and hold territory in the center of Iran for days, if not weeks, depending on how complicated the operation is. Um and you know, thinking back to the Biden administration where they tried to build that pier for humanitarian aid off the coast of Gaza, uh and it didn't work. They kept falling apart on them. that insight into how complicated such physical operations are. You know, it's one thing to pull a person out of a location and then be one and done with it. It's another thing to have to build the infrastructure needed to dig down into the ground to find this enriched uranium and get it out of there while the Iranians know exactly where you are. They know exactly where you're going to go and they know your probable air routes. That's a lot more of a tricky operation that can only be accomplished if there's some sort of political agreement that Iran under this government is simply not going to agree to. >> All right. So, so basically if it is buried under the mountain uh that was mountain facility that was destroyed during uh Midnight Hammer, the only way to get it is going to be a joint cooperative effort between Iran and the US. US isn't going to get it commando style in your opinion? >> Yeah, exactly. Or or another you could also get a UN organization, you know, a UN angle here. the Russians might be more of a trustworthy partner in a in a final political agreement in order to uh to to find this uranium and put it into kind of a safe predictable place. But the issue is the Iranians don't want to give up their sovereignty at all. Not even to the Russians who they trust comparatively on their nuclear program. After all, they're helping the Russians are helping run their their civilian nuclear program as we speak. Um that still the Iranians don't want to give up that sovereignty to the Russians who after all were once a historical rival. >> Okay. Um, so was I interpreting your tone correctly? Uh, that right now the difference between our 15 points and Iran's 15 points is pretty vast. >> Yes. >> Points. I'm sorry. >> I would call it a challenge in and the way that they are seeing how this conflict comes to end. Now remember, Trump has always shown in his negotiation process a great deal of flexibility. You know, he says the maximalist thing. You know, he's used car salesman that says it's $200,000 and then he comes down to $2,000. uh something like that that that's that's long been his approach. So I I expect he'll show some flexibility. The problem is we're already seeing reports from Senate Republicans that they hate uh the stipulations that might come with this ceasefire deal. So and meanwhile the doves aren't assured that this is going to get the United States out of this conflict. So, it's a really it's a struggle for the administration to find a policy that doesn't alienate a significant part of their base while continuing to drive away another part of their base because half of the Republican base very much wants to finish off the Iranians as a threat and the other half wants to end all of America's involvement in the Middle East. This is sort of an irreconcilable political position and in many ways it's an irreconcilable strategic position because you can either go back to containment with the Iranians and hope that the Iranian uh government eventually collapses of its own inequities or you can take it on full scale and pay in high blood and treasure to try to finish the job immediately. Doing both through the middle is kind of what we did in Vietnam and is why the United States ended up in a quagmire there because it never did stick to full strategy in either direction. All right. I I I want to actually dig into some of those military options in a bit. Um but right now, what what is non-negotiable in your mind for the US? Um I presume it's got to be we got to get the uranium somehow or at least some way to really claim victory that we've set you back from getting a nuke by a long time. And I'm guessing free flow through the straight of Hormuz. I'm guessing leaving the straight of Hormuz in Iran's hands as a choke point toll booth is is probably non-negotiable too, but you tell me. >> Well, you know, and Trump is signaling that hormuz may not be so non-negotiable if the US gets a cut of some kind. Uh I don't know how that would necessarily work. The Americans may show some flexibility on Hormuz to see some sort of Hormuz protocol uh be negotiated. The biggest hurdle to a home's protocol would be the Gulf Arab states themselves who don't want to see this this channel choked off. They using significant diplomatic and political and even economic resources to try to sabotage such an agreement. And remember these agreements do exist in other places. Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia have one for the Straits of Mala. Turkey obviously controls the Dardell where they have the Montro treaty. A maritime protocol is something that can be doable under international law. And maybe all it does is say, well, if Iran ever comes under attack, they're allowed to close it off. That could be something that the Americans could possibly go along with under certain circumstances. The Gulf Arabs can't. They don't want any sort of prospect that now Hormuz could be choked off by a formal mechanism that they can't counter. So that's the that's the big problem is so hormuz is probably your biggest most complicated non-starter because so many other actors have have a say in it. The uranium, as you mentioned, is another one that the Americans are after. The Israelis are after that even more. So, that's another complication is that if the Americans agree to allow the Iranians to hold it in some low-level enrichment, you know, a version of Obama's nuclear deal, the Israelis now have the president where they can strike Iran at will to try to destroy that program that undo undoes all of your diplomatic progress. Um, and then other things like the ballistic missiles, the uh proxies, those also are non-starters for certain Republicans. For more restrained isolationist Republicans, they are less of non-starters. They don't see them necessarily as big of a threat. It's it's just that I think that there's an enormous there's such a weak consensus now on what to do with Iran, how urgent Iran is, and whether or not it is worth what we've currently gone through or could go through. that I think is making it hard for to fully understand what is a true non-starter for the United States versus something that the Trump administration will try to come up with some sort of flexible approach that might end up like the status quo ante but some sort of flexible approach that allows the US to exit the conflict. >> Okay. So, so many things that want to ask you about here. Um I hope you're strapped in, right? Um so you mentioned the Gulf States, right? Um, I have got to think, and again, please correct me if I'm wrong because I'm just some armchair amateur here, but my sense is the Gulf States have got to be like, okay, we we we can't go back to the status quo. Uh, what would happen before all this? Iran has has shown its true stripes. It's going to target us whenever it feels pressured. Um, we can't deal with that anymore. So, in my opinion, they're going to exchange as much of their treasure as they need to, and they got a lot of it to really armor up and and uh you know, increase their offensive capabilities as well so that the Gulf neighbor states begin to become a deterrent against Iran, right? To say, "Hey, if you anything like this again, not only going to hopefully call our buddies, the the Americans to come help us, but we're going to have enough missiles and stuff here that you're going to really regret it, Iran." Um my sense too is that they will take their treasure and go to the rest of the world that depends on the straight oil, Europe, Asia, and say, "Look, you guys are stakeholders in this right along with us. We need some sort of international flotilla police force to, you know, keep the straits working smoothly and we'll we'll happily pay for it. It's in our it's in our interests. You know, if you're you're worried about your military spending, don't worry. We'll write big checks." Um am I near the mark here? I mean, do do the both those things seem potentially credible drivers of what comes out of this? >> Um, so yes, I would say yes and no, as we're going to do with the anal analyst thing. Um, the GCC is not a monolith, right? There are hawks against the Iranians like the UAE in Bahrain believes that that Iran can never be trusted ever again and that the ultimate goal should be regime change there. Then Oman and Qatar are still in that camp of we can still live and let live with a version of Iran. We just got to get the Americans and the Israelis off their back so we can live and let live with whatever version of Iran is going to exist. And then we have >> and they feel cutter still feels that way after getting its gas fields blown up. >> Even now the Qataris continue to signal prime minister has said as much where they believe that they can find a diplomatic framework to work again with the Iranians and resume some level of trade. They have to share South Pars uh gas field no matter what. There there's there's nothing they can do about that that sharing function. So they are forced into that position by that basic geography. Um and the Saudis are stuck in a place where they have half a mind of wanting the hawkish approach and half a mind of wanting the dovish approach. And I don't think there's a consensus within Saudi about how they want this to be done. Um because they're the most exposed. And if you're talking about this idea of turning the Gulf Arab states into a more effective military deterrent against the Iranians, it has to be Saudi Arabia that takes on the bulk of that that burden. Their population is the largest. Most Gulf Arab states are mostly foreigners with the exception of Oman uh and the southis. The Emiratis are not going to be uh conscripting a bunch of Indian laborers to be part of of a landing force for their their disputed islands in the Gulf Arab states or the in the Persian Gulf. They're going to be relying on a few thousand elite Emirati troops that if they endure, you know, a few dozen casualties, that's the end of the war for the Emiratis. They can't fight for very long uh because of their small population. So the Saudis know that if they're going to do the conventional deterrence game, they are the ones who are going to have to suffer the casualties just like they have in Yemen where where hundreds of Saudi soldiers have been killed uh in the course of the 10-year intervention in that country. Um and they are looking for non US sources. Now they're preferring non US NATO or major non-NATO ally sources like South Korea, uh Turkey, the Israelis, the French, the Germans, the Brits. Those are places where you will see uh Gulf Arab sovereign wealth funds start to dump some of their investment money into to get better air defenses, better jets, um better tanks, etc. from non US sources because they would like to reduce their reliance on the Americans. They can't do it very quickly. This is a decadesl long process that they're going to have to do because they have to retrain their forces on this hardware. But it was something they were doing before and I think it will accelerate afterwards. And the Ukrainians are another place that are going to get a boon out of this. the Gulf Arab states are going to dump a fair bit of money to the Ukrainians in exchange for Ukrainian air defense knowhow um and and intelligence sharing against this mutual you know Iran's uh Russian military alliance or mil you it would be a formal alliance but that military relationship is so deep that the two can now cooperate um now in terms of can they get a flotillaa into hormuz I think the answer is still no uh and the answer is still no in part because if the Americans can't do it no No one else has the conventional capability to replace that American counterweight. Uh the British and French navies are not what they were. The the German navy is very small. So Europe doesn't really have a capability and many Europeans simply don't have an appetite to open up a front in the Middle East when the Russians are still moving on Ukraine. There's a there's a great fear of of Europe straining their defense budgets and and committing themselves to too much. The same with the uh with Asia where they're more worried about China than they are with Hormuz. And there's still an implicit assumption that Hormuz will in some form or another normalize. And when it normalizes, it will leave out those countries. Uh it will, you know, it will when it normalizes, it will probably be designed to have leverage over the Americans. It doesn't necessarily have to be designed to have leverage over the Europeans or the East Asians. And I think that's still part of the calculus of wanting to remain outside of this war. >> Okay. So, let me dig into that just a little bit. So the these other countries Europe, Asia, etc. strong economic interest dependency on getting hormuz normalized, right? Um in other words, if if it remained choked off, eventually they'd have to take some action, right? Because they're they're suffering so much economically from it going on. Um, so one would think that they would want to get involved and either try to, you know, negotiate whatever the solution is or, you know, say, hey, look, we're we're happy to contribute something to to reopen this thing, right? Not not necessarily as an as an aggressive kinetic forced opening, but like, yeah, we'll we'll all be part of our a flotilla there. And of course, the deterrence of that isn't necessarily the flotillaa itself. Sure, it's probably still vulnerable going through the straits to whatever Iran might want to throw at it, but it's a much greater risk because if you do, if you attack it, well, then you're not just going against America, you're going against, you know, perhaps a much larger multinational military coalition. >> Um, does that have deterred value in and of itself? >> I don't think it does anymore. It it would have perhaps before this war. Um, the Israelis and Americans have kind of already unleashed a lot of their worst against the Iranians. uh there's not a lot that the Europeans can bring that would be a significant qualitative impact on the Iranians. Um and there's also there's also this this realization from these these European states that if they get attacked by the IRGC, now they're trapped in a conflict that they didn't start that is with that was unpopular in Europe and it's unpopular in America and is dragging them along the path of of a coalition of the unwilling, so to speak. there there all of these European politicians highly mindful of Tony Blair's legacy for going into Iraq alongside George W. Bush is a volunteer and his government was eventually, you know, pulled down and the discredited. If they end up being a combatant in this conflict, even if they do reopen Hormuz, it could be the end of their political careers and potentially the end of their ruling party's power for a very long time because most Europeans, they won't eventually conclude, oh, you got my energy back. They'll conclude, you dragged us into an un, you know, another endless war that we didn't want alongside a president that we don't particularly like. So, there's not a lot of political upsides to get involved. Instead, what I think the Europeans would do is is they would do a form of they're going to, of course, rely on their energy reserves, you know, their their strategic petroleum reserves, strategic gas reserves, and they're going to drag that up for as long as they can. If they have to, they'll get to that point that we're already seeing in the Middle East and subsaharan Africa of beginning rationing. And I think that's where we will see that is kind of one of the key indicators that I'm looking at as the market panic moment of of of a major industrial country formally rationing saying the lights are off from six to six something like that the way that we've already seen in Cairo. You know those countries are big economies but they are not connected to the global media or economic uh system the way that say Paris or Seoul or Tokyo is. Um, and I don't know if we'll get there, but I think that that's the indicator that we'll need to see for your moment of like the the market waking up and saying, "Wait a second, this is structurally happening now. We can't possibly ignore this." And then your paper traders finally catch up to your your actual supply traders uh in terms of price. >> Okay. And I get your point about Europe's reluctance here. um the fact that uh Iran sent that uh mid-range missile um that basically let the world know that hey they've actually got the technology now to send missiles you know basically as far as like Oslo therefore covering most of Europe. Um that that right now isn't a uh potential game-changing political development where they might say hey we got to get a little bit more involved now because we're more were more exposed than we maybe thought before. >> If there was a significant quantity of these missiles, I think so. But again, the Europeans have such a pacifistic political tradition and they're so focused on the Russians that it's hard for them to think of these things like two or three steps ahead of like this is a developing threat and it's better to nip it from the bud now. They much prefer from a political and strategic standpoint to be reactive. And we keep seeing this again and again where the Russians have outflanked the Europeans for, you know, 15 some odd years with with different aggressive moves and the Europeans, you know, react to that and say, don't do it again and there's not significant enough penalties or counterreactions to prevent uh the next step of Russian aggression. And I think the Iranians are calculating that that Europe, you know, an older continent, heavily in debt, very big welfare spending. Uh it just doesn't have the political will to get engaged in this kind of conflict. In fact, it does seem like the external actor that we should be looking at more is seems to be China who who was instrumental with convincing the Iranians to very least say yes to this ceasefire, at least according to reporting we've seen as of last night. Now, of course, Iran said yes because we won. But it's still the same yes that China needs to see for energy prices to moderate to take some pressure off of their own economy. So, in terms of external involvement, it looks like it's Beijing that's starting to take those steps towards we have to do something about this. it's hitting us now. What can we do? >> Okay. And and the So, Beijing's uh incentive to wanting to get this thing resolved and stepping in like it like it has, as you just said. Is that because its oil flows have been crimped and so it's it's feeling the same pressures as everybody else. It's paying more for oil and maybe it's having some supply tightness, >> right? The you know, remember that China is where a lot of the Middle East's physical oil, like it's a global market. we all trade on the same price but the physical oil mostly goes to Asia and a lot of it goes to China and that's both Iranian and Saudi oil. So there's been a physical uh impact in China that we have not seen in the United States and won't see in the United States because of the small amount of Middle Eastern oil that we now import. >> So that is one of the reasons that China has had a greater impetus to try to find a way to create a hole for energy supplies to resume to China because it's impacting them earlier and we've seen jet fuel prices skyrocket throughout Asia. Flight prices are skyrocketing around Asia. Countries like Thailand and Malaysia are already starting their energy rationing programs and most of it's voluntary, but it's energy rationing. So, they need to do it first just because the sphere of the earth means that uh you know tankers that left for China were the ones that you know they arrived earliest and their replacements are the ones to not arrive the soonest. >> Okay. Um All right. I'm gonna I'm gonna throw what might be a crazy idea out there and feel free to tell me how terrible this is, but it it's come up in a couple recent discussions I've had. It was sort of a thought I had on the fly about a week or more ago, and I don't think I bounced it off of you yet. Um, so oil exports out of the Gulf um represent something like 85% of the income to the Iranian regime. I think I've seen, correct me if that's wrong, but you're nodding as I'm saying this. Okay. Um, so if we could basically cut off that income, right, we would economically suffocate uh Iran and presumably the regime would capitulate, right? Um, that's one of the reasons why Carg Island has been such a flash point here, right? Where the US has said, well, we could obviously bomb it and just take it off the the game board here. Um but that would hurt the people of Iran a lot more permanently than than we would like to do, right? We're fighting the regime, not the people. Uh the president has said, "Well, I could, you know, maybe, you know, take it over, right, with Marines, but then of course that's boots on the ground, and that's the Marines concentrated in the, you know, single location where they could be targeted by Iranian ballistics. Uh very unpopular at home, right? So here's my idea. Rather than deal with the the kill zone of the straits putting boots on the ground, whatever they're destroying energy infrastructure, we've got our navy parked in the Arabian Sea. Why don't we just wait for the tankers with Iranian oil to come out of the straits and then interdict them and just basically put it in an embargo and tell China, "Hey, you know what? We're not forever stealing your oil here, but it's a war. We're doing this because we got to we got to choke off our enemy here. um you're going to get it when the war is over. We're just going to park it here for you. And if you need supply in the near term, we'll happily sell it to you. We'll send US tankers to you, China, so you you're you still get your oil, but we effectively still economically strangle the regime. What what's terrible about that idea? >> Well, so there are some downsides, but I am I'll agree with you, Adam. I'm surprised the US didn't start this in the initial phase, even before the bombing, grabbing Iranian tankers like they did with Venezuela was something we discussed as a team. >> Exactly. We just did this. Yeah, >> it was a likely option. Now, it wasn't a perfect option, but it was a way to signal the Iranians, we are going to strangle you without destroying your supplies, and therefore, you don't need to do supply destruction across the Gulf in retaliation. You need to come up with a smarter counter. You need to find a way to to, you know, to to offer us concessions. It seemed like a smarter option um a month of plus. Now, if you do it now, it would feed into the energy so shock concerns because now Iran's retaliation would have to be the supply destruction we're now seeing creeping through the Gulf Arab states. We still don't know how bad the supply destruction has been so far. It can certainly get worse. Um, that East West pipeline, is that knocked off for a week or a month or a year? We don't know uh as of this morning, but if that 5 million or so, 6 million or so barrels per day going east west can't do that anymore for a long amount of time, oil prices are going to have to go up. So the Iranians have the option to do this to make this even worse and to strike these targets even more thoroughly than they have because we do have some evidence that they have retained and have have held in reserve some of their more advanced capabilities that they were preparing for this scenario where they needed to carry out more precise supply destruction. So now that we're in a war scenario, the risk is if you do the blockade, it is better than in in a lot of ways from a risk standpoint than boots on the ground. It doesn't involve Iranian supply destruction. It does still push up the price of oil because Iranian oil is part of the reason that oil prices haven't gone haywire, but it now puts the IRGC in a position where they say they're grabbing our oil. We have to destroy everything in Saudi Arabia, in the UAE, etc., including their pipelines, and they may have the capability to get pretty close to that. So that's why it seems like the administration has been hesitant on on this is knowing that they could push the Iranians in the supply destruction uh area. The other is that it just may not have been raised to the president. And so what I've seen some of the New York Times reporting of people in the room when this was being discussed for the war plans with Netanyahu and General Kaine and others, it may not have come up at all as an option. It seems like Trump was very highly focused on the Israeli war plan uh rather than what they just did in Venezuela. Other than the fact that he believed Venezuela was a great success. So there are two factors. It could make things worse especially at this point and the other is that it just might not have come up um in the course of the war planning. >> I I I have trouble believing the latter. Not that you may not be right, but I have trouble believing the latter. Not because I think this is such a phenomenal idea that no one's ever thought of. It's quite the contrary. you know, when you hear like the generals being interviewed on on TV, as I'm sure you you've said, you know, they basically say, "Look, it's ridiculous to think that America didn't think about, you know, Iran taking control of the straight because they're like, we have war gamed going to war against Iran since the 80s." Like, I'm sure they have thought of every single permutation and run all the statistics on which, you know, developments would have the the greatest uh likelihood of success. Um, so maybe they've run this one and it and it and it hasn't. Um, but I I still haven't really figured out why it's not superior to a lot of the things that we're talking about. And and I get your point that okay, that might be the line that Iran just says we got to go scorch the earth on everybody. But I don't know. Um, because a we could say look, hey, if you start doing that, we will bomb Car Island and we will bomb all of your electrical facilities and your bridges and like like Iran, we we've won. we've got our boot on your neck here because we we we we're taking your oil. We've drunk your milkshake and if you just start wantingly trying to destroy everybody in your region, um we're just going to do all the things that are going to you'll never come back from. Like you will never come back from that. >> Well, you know, and just on that front of like how it may not have come up to Trump is because it may have been that they just listened to the Israeli war plan which doesn't think in blockades. It thinks about destruction. The Israelis believed that they could knock the Islamic Republic off of its uh offkilter permanently with a strong powerful blow like they did with Hezbollah at the end of 2024. That seems to be the war plan they were sold on. The analysts on the other hand, everybody working in below the government has thought about every one of these things like you said since the 80s that doesn't knowing a lot of people some of my colleagues are former IC. Uh you write a big long report and only one person reads it and then throws it in the trash. Um, and that's just part of the way that our our internet intelligence community works is that sometimes your customer, i.e. your boss or politician simply doesn't pass on the information up the chain of command for various reasons. Um, but that being said, if you decide to go and cut off Iran's supply through Car Island and through the sea, you also not only supply you also incentivize the supply destruction, you also incentivize the Russians and the Chinese to get in more involved in Iran's adaptation strategy. and the geography still favors them on this front. Iran could uh ship across the Caspian into the Russian supplies and and uh they could also build railways and pipelines through Central Asia uh in order to get to China. These are expensive and slow processes. >> Yeah, I mean they take a while. Yeah, this this is not during a war, I imagine. not during a war, but the Russians and the Chinese can financially backs stop the uh the Iranian government during this emergency period in order to prevent it from collapsing, which is what they've done in other places. The US has done this in other places. They can do just enough of a financial backs stop to allow a combatant to fight the war. Then the war ends and then they come up with these same backups that mean that Hormuz and Car Island are less relevant for the Iranians afterwards. because it doesn't seem like just because you destroy Carve Island that the Basie stops showing up for work. The Basie will work and and and continue to control the country without a paycheck for a significant period of time. We don't know how long that would be, but with Syria, um we know that the regime wasn't paying its soldiers for months and even years, and they continued to fight the civil war because they were true believers. So, you don't break the regime overnight. Instead, you do harm the regime economically. you make their reconstruction path a lot more difficult. But you do incentivize their partners to be more active in helping them adapt to survive that because from Moscow and Beijing's perspective, the collapse of the Islamic Republic is not something they'd want to see um as a result of a supply destruction campaign by the US. >> Okay. Um All right. All right. I I mean, I could rat hole on the supply destruction thing because that that seems to be Iran's um >> I don't want to call it in in a hole because I I I I think it goes down as it does that. Yeah. >> Um but but that's that's its deterrent. We'll put it that way, right? That that's its quote unquote nuke nuclear deterrent here, right? It's it's equivalent to a nuclear deterrent, right? Hey, cross our red line and we just kill all our neighbors, right? Essentially. >> Yeah. Um, and I do think I mean, let's stick with this for a second. Let's say that happens, right? Iran goes scorched earth as best it can, right? Now, obviously, we'll be there trying to minimize their ability to do that. Um, its its partner, sorry, its neighbors aren't just going to take it sitting down. Presumably, they would they would get more kinetically involved. I don't know what they can bring, but they they'd get more kinetically involved. um what would the aftermath of of that look like? Yes, oil would go to some crazy number for a while, but if it ended up with Iran essentially being done, right? Because at that point too, we'd go in and presumably destroy every single piece of infrastructure they have, right? Um I mean, it's 20% of the world's oil. It's not a it's not 100%. I mean that hurts on the margin, but there's still 80% of oil left in the world. Those ex other net exporting countries would increase their production. You know, nations would would switch. Yes, there'd be rationing. There'd be all sorts of things in the near term. Trump would be very unpopular uh at home and wouldn't win the midterms and all that stuff. But again, the world would kind of go on, >> right? Um is that something America could live with? >> Well, yeah. Yeah, I mean the answer to a lot of these kind of doomsday scenarios is that the world continues no matter what. Uh and the world adapts and there are winners and losers in the course of that adaptation strategy. Um I think in the short term it's a shock right and it would be such a shock that we'd be so deep that you almost guarantee a global recession that would be deep and lasting. Global recessions tend to come with political unrest. So lots of governments would change around the world u both in the favor of populists and maybe non-pop populists as well. It would, you know, it would definitely be a boon for the Russians and their war effort because they would be one of the the the major suppliers of oil now. Uh, and the world would have to come to terms with that. And it might even feed into Ukraine losing the political will to fight because now they know the European partners need Russian gas and oil more than they need Ukraine and they're willing to partition Ukraine. So, you could see an end of that conflict because Europe and the US just lose the political will and so does Ukraine at the same time. reading the writing on the wall. You could also see lots of unrest in countries like Egypt or South Africa. You could see a lot of these energy importers going through such significant shocks that governments that aren't really delivering fall apart. Well, in the meantime, other countries like the US where we're run by a nationalist populace, you might see the similar kind of of counterback, you know, backlash to it that results in a more technocratic government taking power with our next election cycle and is more focused on adapting and fixing our energy crisis. um in a way that you know when Reagan came to power in 1980 it was in part to fix the energy crisis it was in part to fix the Iran crisis and fix inflation and so on and so forth in in what was in many ways a technocratic approach you know from the right technocratic but a technocratic approach so yes the world can survive this I think it's a question of how much adaptation a country is capable of whether or not its population is already incentivized to go in favor of that adaptation or whether or not there are such big inequities within that country that fuel unre unrest and create new conflicts where there weren't some before. Um, one of the more interesting outlays of the Ukraine war was the Yemen ceasefire and that was because the Houthis were hit so hard by the food and fuel shortage by Ukraine that they were willing to finally agree to a ceasefire with the Saudis because they simply couldn't they needed the humanitarian lifelines uh reopened. So there was a there was a a a deescalation that resulted from war in Europe. that would also happen is that other places where people are engaged in confrontations suddenly couldn't. Um I would see the US and China stepping back from the brink of confrontation in some ways because they would need each other more to cooperate in the aftermath of such a significant energy shock. All of a sudden you could see Chinese solar panels all over the United States because that's one of the offsets that we would need to take if there was a significant and lasting supply destruction. So that's not you know pros and cons, right? the idea of uh maybe the solar panels are are rigged with spyware and things like that. Um but nevertheless, those sort of force adaptations would which would push some adversaries together while driving others apart. >> Feel free to to not answer this question. Um but you have studied this region forever. You're an expert in it. Um the western view of Iran is largest state sponsor of terror in the world, right? Uh they're they're the regime the world would least like to see get a nuclear weapon because they think that it's the regime most likely to actually use it, right? That type of thing. It's it's been a fmentor of of chaos in its region. You know, whatever. You know the list. everything you just mentioned that could happen if if if Iran goes postal and attacks all you know tries to do the supply d energy supply destruction in its area and then we in the world just crush Iran. Is that a price worth paying to remove the Iranian threat permanently from the table? >> Um you would have to ask of course the American voter who has a significant say in this like at the end of the day we're having elections. we will have elections. Um that's how our strategy is formulated is partially through our political pillar of geopolitics. It filters up from the grassroots demands. America's interests in the region are energy and trade. That's it. Those are our core geopolitical imperatives that we care about are energy and trade. How do you go about assuring those? If Iran is an obstacle, you can do uh you know the the brute force approach that you know so many hackers and everything you just keep guessing the password until you guess it. You can do a brute force approach, but it's a significant investment in time, treasure, and blood. Is that worth the trade-off? Because the payoff may be 10 years down the line. Some will argue yes, because now you will have removed a significant American adversary, and you will have assured America's energy and trade supply lines in a massive way um for a long time to come. Others, on the other hand, will say it's not worth my political career. It's not worth, you know, my kids who are being sent to Iran to fight this war. Sure. It's not it's not worth me paying uh you know $9 a gallon or whatever it is for the next two or three years and me losing my job. Um because I don't think in 10-year timelines. I think in quarterly timelines, one-year timelines, etc. >> Sure. >> So, from a macro standpoint, my own opinion on how to approach the Iranians. Um since all we care about is energy and trade, I think the cheapest, most politically sustainable way to deal with the Iranians was containment. uh which is what we were doing even under Trump's maximum pressure campaign was still containment. We've ended that strategy. We've shifted to military pressure. We're now on with the Israelis on this mow the grass campaign where if we continue if we strike Iran every there and again the idea is that eventually it becomes so weak like Syria did that it falls apart on its own. I think there's a lot of problems with that strategy that mow the grass campaign. I don't know how the US can get out of being stuck in that dynamic having now ended containment because the Iranians won't accept containment again. They're going to use Hormuz as leverage over the global economy to break out of containment. So the US could go back to a cheaper approach which is containment light which means some sanctions relief allowing the Iranians to reconstruct themselves and essentially trying to find conventional deterrence to the Iranians so they don't think war is a great option to them in the future but having to accept that Iran is going to stay on the map and remain a significant middle power in the region. That would be another version of containment that I think is weaker than what we had, but might be the cheapest option going forward for both the American people and America's strategy globally at large. Okay. So, it's it's amazing to me on social media, right, the world I live in, um, how viferously people on either side are arguing that their side is winning. um you know militarily you know pro-American people are saying look this is like the best it's the most successful war ever right most successful military operation ever in terms of like you know damage inflicted on the enemy versus lives and and machinery lost um at this point um then there's a bunch of people on the Iran side saying you know you're kidding me Iran is totally the winner here right Um, do you have a strong opinion one way or the other? >> Uh, I think they're fighting two different wars which allows them to claim two different victory narratives. Um, the conventional war fought by the American Israelis is certainly a victory on the tactical front. You know, superiority on every level, not very many losses and a lot of targets struck. The Iranians asymmetric retaliation has been superior to what the Americans have been able to do. The American drone program is way far behind. uh people I talked to in the defense industry that are trying to come up with anti-drone tech are saying we've been out innovated by the Iranians in the way that they are able to strike us with such cheaper systems against our very expensive hardware. Um right now what it looks like to me is a stalemate because of that dynamic is that both sides have caused damage to one another and I think we will get a better sense of how much damage is lasting to either one in six months or 12 months. Then we'll really know whether or not Iran has been fatally damaged and and can't come back from it or if Trump is fatally damaged politically and can't achieve anything else as a result of this. Is this is this his Katrina or Afghanistan moment where his presidency is more or less finished afterwards? That's something that we'll be able to assess better in 12 months. But it looks like to me they fought two different wars to the net effect of neither side having significant leverage over the other. um because neither one has the capabilities or the willingness to impose that you know that that fullscale uh conventional victory over the over them that that would be necessary since after all Iran almost functions like a guerilla government you know an underground movement it it is very similar in that structure to the Vietkong in North Vietnam where it's very hard you can kill thousands of them but that doesn't break their political will it doesn't end the war and as long as they've got the supply lines of their foreigners they keep fighting and will keep fighting. So there's that dynamic. At the same time, Iran can't stop the US from operating throughout its country and you know carrying out special operations. Um and so those two dynamics are almost like the ceasefire. They're talking past each other in ter in terms of what does victory look like? Um and that's why I tend to think this is not the last Iran war. It will be the it's the fourth one since April 2024 when Israel and Iran finally attacked each other. Yeah, >> I think we're going to be seeing a series of these conflicts lasting throughout the rest of the Trump presidency. >> Okay. Um, and here's here's sort of well, here's just a follow-up question on that, which is, um, you could you can make the argument, well, look, yeah. All right, the US, forget about whatever tactical statistics you want to throw at me. Iran's still around, right? the the the regime. Yeah. Different guys, but but pretty much different, you know, different leaders, but pretty much the same regime in place and whatnot. So, you can say Iran is has um manage to continue to persist and the US doesn't really have an easy way to pull them out by the roots, right? >> Um the question I asked the other night on on X was just to the people who are saying, "Well, Iran is totally winning." It's like, can you name a country in the world that would swap places with Iran right now? It would say that looks so great. You're you're winning so badly. I would love to trade places with you be right. I mean, they have Yes, the regime is still persisting and they can still threaten and inflict damage, but their country has been carpet bombed. Their leadership has been, you know, eviscerated down several levels. Um, I don't if it all if the ceasefire leads to a peace agreement, I'm not sure Iran looks around and says, "Well, this was great. You know, we we we just got sent back, you know, infrastructure-wise several decades probably worth of rebuilding." >> Um, yeah, we we we can thumb our nose at the Great Satan, but, you know, we're we're going to have a lot of permanent injuries uh coming out of this. So, uh, is is it roughly equal or or, you know, I I just don't get the sense that Iran is emerging from this stronger? Yeah, they've got some bragging rights about this, but I it it's it's sort of like I don't know, you know, getting beaten up in a back alley and not dying and saying, "Hey, I kept those guys from killing me." But you're you're going to have some permanent injuries the rest of your life. I think for Iran the qu the final assessment will have to be written on how they do their reconstruction and how that how effective that is. Um they this was of course this is reason that they were not a first mover with with military aggression throughout the region. Even after Hezbollah was attacked even after Hassan Nasarallo was assassinated so many confrontations and provocations by the Israelis the Iranians were quite restrained in how they responded because they never wanted to be in this situation. This was the playbook for after Kmeni's assassination. Kameani was assassinated. They then put this worst case scenario to action because not doing anything would be worse than doing something. So in that sense certainly Iran never itself didn't want to be in this position but it happened anyway uh because of external uh actions by the Israelis and the Americans. They thought that they could find a way to continue to play enough diplomatic time to avoid this situation. That was a miscalculation with Trump. It turned out that he ran out of patience rather quickly. uh on the nuclear talks. So where does Iran go from here? If they can find a significant way to carry out reconstruction in addition to military rehabilitation with its great power partners, Iran can come out on the other side of this more radical and more hardline but potentially more secure. On the other hand, if the Iranians decide they're going to continue to focus on their sovereignty and kind of their third way foreign policy where they don't have too deep of alignments with the Russians and the Chinese, where they're still being very confrontational with the Americans for the sake of it, I think that is a losing prospect in the long term. But long term is a long time. I could be a very old man before I see an Iranian Gorbachoff finally emerge in the 2050s who said, "Remember that war in 2026? What a disaster that was." Um so that's where I think we need to see with that we need to see how they reconstruct and rehabilitate themselves after this. Um they are not suffering the kind of crushing military defeat that the Egyptians did in 1973 when the Israelis encircled their third army and it looked like Egypt was going to win until they didn't. That broke Egypt's political will to continue to fight those Israeli Arab wars and it forced Egypt's government to shift its alignment in the international system from the Soviets to the Americans. We haven't inflicted anything that decisive on the Iranians where they have no choice but to admit, hey, you won. You know, if we surrounded an Iranian army, took 100,000 prisoners, then the Iranians would have 100,000 hostages that they would have no choice but to deal with that reality. Assassinations, on the other hand, they can just put up with that in indefinitely. Um, and they can put up with the destruction of infrastructure from the air indefinitely because all they're going to say is we can rebuild it. The question is, can they actually do that? And if they can't, I think that they are going to be facing a Syrialike future where the system steadily decays until one day there's a protest movement and the Bas decide I'm not showing up for this one, >> right? I'm done. >> But I don't think that's going to happen this year and it may not happen next year or the year after. It may take a long time because as we've discussed before, Iran's a very big country and its ideology is still relatively young. We tend to think of ideologies as like about a hundred years is how long an ideology has before it runs out of its own generational >> about a human lifetime. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, they still got they're 50 years in. They can keep doing this probably for another 25 years before the younger people being born now and in the 2010s say, "I don't believe in the Islamic Republic. I don't believe in any of this nonsense. I'm besieged, but I do it for the paycheck. Paycheck stop coming. I'm not showing up either." Um, so we can end up there, but I just don't see it happening in the near term. >> Okay. And look, I'm not trying to push, you know, Team America here, but I'm just curious to get your reaction to this, which is just, you know, Iran is extremely vulnerable here in this, right? In other words, we can blow up Car Island any minute, right? We we we can take out its oil fields as well and and all its other infrastructure, you know, overnight if we really wanted to, right? So, they have that sort of damicles hanging over their heads. Now, they've got their dead man switch, but again, it's not a fun country after you've gotten to that point, right? And um you know, I don't know what Trump's thinking, but I think part of Trump's logic here is like, look, I'm just showing them they woke the big dog up and I came in and I've smacked them down, hurt him pretty hard. They're still around, but do you want to go through that again? >> You know, to mow the lawn kind of in your language, right? But but I mean, is there a chance here that Iran is just saying like, you know what, there's got to be a better strategy than this? >> I mean, certainly there is. And the better strategy they're hoping for is informal control of Hormuz. That that's what they seem to be aiming for. And we'll see if they can get some sort of informal control of Hormuz and some sort of sanctions relief because that's part of the reconstruction strategy if they can get that because, you know, can Trump start this kind of war every six months? I mean, from a legal standpoint, it looks like he can. Congress isn't going to stop him uh anytime soon. >> From an electoral standpoint, though, who knows? >> So, but can he keep doing it without evaporating his political capital? I don't think so. I think is I think his his presidency has been wounded by this policy choice in a way that it won't come back from. Is it a fatal wound? We'll see. Um but that that's something that the Iranians are looking at and they have always calculated we can fight a long war and a long war for us could be 10 to 20 years like the Taliban and the Americans can only fight it quarter to quarter and you know election cycle to election cycle. That's always factored into their thinking. So they're the Iranians are looking at this toward the November midterms towards 2028. if it has to go until that point that's something that they're braced for. On the other for Trump on the other hand, you know, he has to think in shorter timelines because of the nature of our political system. Um, and then that, you know, that shifts the Iranian imperatives of again the reconstruction thing is something they have to confront when the war is firmly over. But as long as there's a war emergency, it makes it easier to control the population, easier to prevent a protest movement that would be fatal. And it keeps the elites, especially the security elites, united because it's an external aggressor. >> Okay. Um, I want to get to some positive stuff in just a second, but um, so when when I'm going to preface this by saying, and I know I'm going to get a bunch of blowback in the comments here, um, but when Trump uh, addressed the nation last week, um, I I wrote after that, I think it was a missed opportunity because what I thought one of the the things the president should have done most was talk to the uncertain American voter who is uncomfortable with the war and doesn't understand why America felt it had to take action on February 28th, right? And and you know, you may remember a couple weeks ago there was a bunch of talk about, well, there was an imminent threat, right? But I think a lot of Americans are sort of like, wait a minute, like Iran's been close to getting a nuke for a while. We've been here we've been hearing that for years and years. like like what what was it that you know was essential for us to have to take action then right and some people have said well because Israel was going to act and this is Israel setting the tune and America being Israel's lap dog and all that stuff right >> so I felt that that Trump really just needed to talk to those should have talked to those people and just said hey look this is why I had to go right and he didn't um what was interesting is Marco Rubio sent out a like a two-minute video clip around the same time making that case. I thought it was actually uh exactly what Trump should have said. And look, I'm not saying folks, you have to agree with what Rubio said, but at least it was a cogent, hey, this is why it got to an imminent state. And if I if I took the right message away from Rubio's video, Ryan, it was that Iran was sort of hyperacelerating its ballistics uh capabilities, basically a porcupine strategy. We wanted to become so ballistically um uh strong uh that um we could then develop our nuclear uh bomb program to the point where we would have enough you could basically get a bomb and nobody could could stop us from doing that because we had so many ballistics, so many drones. We were basically going to become too hard to assail, too painful to assail. and that the US said, "Look, our red line's always been Iran can't have a bomb, and so we've got to step in now and degrade their ballistics capabilities, not just their their inventory of ballistics, but their ability to to manufacture more. Um, we we got to stop that now because it's about to cross the event horizon where we're not going to be able to easily stop that in the future." And then obviously we got to we got to >> once that's done, we got to figure out, you know, how to make sure they don't enrich uranium again. Um, what is your reaction to that? Is is that what your intelligence has been telling you? Was that the reason that we needed to the rationale for why the US needed to act or is that just political theater to try to give some justification to this? >> So, quickly, three answers on that. The first is that yes, the intelligence suggests that the Iranians were rapidly rebuilding their missiles and drones after the June 2025 war and that they were moving to reconstitute their nuclear program at a pace that was faster than what the Americans and the Israelis believed after that war. Remember, Trump said it was obliterated. The intelligence community never believed that. They believed it had been set back. That was his language for political purposes. The Israelis particularly were saying that they're they're doing this a lot faster than we thought they could. So essentially it was the mowing the grass strategy and the Israelis and parts of the IC and the US were were assessing that the grass was growing back much faster than they had expected. >> Okay. So so there was a legit critical threshold that concerned >> it was it was critical in the sense that what they were hoping is that the Iranians would be so weakened after June 2025 that they would offer concessions through the diplomatic front. Of course the Israelis wanted for a different purpose. They believed that they had degraded them enough to set them up for regime change uh in the future. So it's two different two different tracks. The Americans wanted to weaken their resolve. The Israelis wanted to weaken their capabilities to survive. Both of them were assessing that the capabilities were regenerating where neither of those goals were violians wouldn't quickly come back from and that Iran would be incapable of closing Hormuz because they we would destroy so much in the first wave. at least. Again, that's what we're seeing from the initial reporting out of the New York Times uh of all of these leaks out of the administration. So, they were told it'd be an easy war. And then the third part is he thought it be could be as fast as Maduro, that he wouldn't even need to sell to the public. He would just do it. He would be successful. On the other side of it, he'd claim victory after four or five days. Um, and that he'd be able to walk away with that big, you know, victory sigil of saying, "I didn't have to ask your permission. I'm just >> Do you think that's true? Because that just sounds if it was true, it sounds so incredibly naive. >> Dural said was insane to me when I woke up that morning and saw that we had abducted a sovereign leader of another country and done it, you know, in such a short time. I I thought there's no way somebody green lit this, but they did. >> To totally agree, but but comparing Venezuela and Iran from a complexity standpoint is you'd have to be an idiot to to >> that one would go just like the other. They they thought the Israelis were saying and the Americans seem to believe at least the one the Americans that mattered, the ones the decision makers believed they could treat Iran like Israel did Hezbollah at the end of 2024 with capstone assassination campaigns, strikes on targets at scale to the point where the Iranians are so knocked off kilter that their retaliation would be mild or weak or limited uh and that their political will to resist would be significantly weakened as well. Remember, Trump says over and over again, we've had regime change. Um, what he means by that is he's killed all the initial right leadership and replaced them with people who are arguably more hardline than their than the uh their predecessors. But that that was believed, the assumptions were believed that if they did this at such a senior level, with such precision, with such suddenness, with no warning, that it would shock the Iranians into concessions and then prevent the Iranians from being able to rebuild themselves because of how hard they would hit them. The problem was, and I think we talked about this before, Iran's a middle power. It's too big to do this in a weekend. America hasn't fought a country of this size since the Chinese in Korea. There's no tradition of what this means. A World War II planner would have looked at this campaign and said, "You're going to need half a million troops. You're going to need X, Y, and Z. You're going to need to ration the country for six months because of the scale of what you're asking." But we're so used to fighting the CNN surgical wars that the war planners overlooked that because they knew the political will for that kind of struggle was simply not there. >> Okay. All right. I'm going to start wrapping up real quick. Um just from your assessment. So let's say just war stops today. How set back is Iran in your opinion? I think that they, you know, I'll go off of Israeli assessments that might still be a little bit too optimistic, but they're saying about half of Iran's ballistic missiles are still intact. It's probably a bit higher than that. Their drone program is still intact. Their political system is still intact. A lot of damage has been done to their infrastructure that will be hard to rebuild. Uh, you know, especially on the civilian front, I don't know how long that will necessarily take for them to get that back up uh uh up and running. But I think that you'll have two narratives. On the civilian front, it's worse for the Iranians. Their civilian economy is going to look at the next six to 12 months as a very tough time period as they try to adapt to this. On the military front, I think that the system will choose to produce more guns than butter the way that we see countries like North Korea do uh in order to harden and fortify a military arm that has largely been able to weather the worst that has been thrown at it so far. So, I think you'll have two narratives and it's it's a question of whether or not the security forces can adapt into a North Korea style posture where the country is run for the sake of the armed forces or if they're going to get overwhelmed because Iran is a complex nation, lots of different ethnicities, more poorest borders, not necessarily the same kind of security support from its great power partners. Um, if it gets overwhelmed by this reconstruction process. So I Iran will remain dangerous and Iran will be remain capable of causing more harm and disruptions in case of more escalations into the near future. Whether or not the political economy cracks in half and whether or not we start to see that that fatal weakening, I think that's to remains to be seen. But the elements of it are definitely going to be there in the aftermath of this war. >> Okay. Um but if you had to to to guess um so even if they go the guns route, right? Um, and I know there's a lot we don't know for sure. Um, currently the just listened this morning to the Department of War update. You know, they're basically saying, "Look, we've we've destroyed the vast majority of their militaryindustrial infrastructure, right? So, their ability to to rebuild this stuff, it's it's they're going to have to rebuild all those factories first before they can start rebuilding the drones and the missiles and everything like that. um you know all this stuff will presumably take time. Um, and I guess my question to you is if if if Iran was a 10 in terms of its ability to um, you know, be proactive about things uh, going forward, what number would you give them right now given that there's going to be at least some period of time where they're just going to have to be devoting their energies and and their revenues to just rebuilding what they what they used to have before. in terms of, you know, we're kind of rating at 0 to 10 in terms of their regenerative abilities. I would give the posturing probably uh a range of six to eight and I would give it a higher end on the eight scale if they integrate more with the Russians and the Chinese. And remember, China's got tons of steel and concrete that they used to do dumping for, they can they can provide the reconstruction materials through the Caspian. Uh if if the if Hormuz remains closed, uh to to help Iran rebuild quickly. Um, also the Iranians need a version of Albert Shar from from World War II with Germany. Remember the Germans under the Allied air bombardment. They were producing more weapons uh under the Allied air bombardment in 1944 than they were only a couple of years before because they had a masterindustrial designer who understood how to build such a resilient system. It was only when they lost territory that their arms production industry actually collapsed. Iran can go in that direction if they have the kind of leaders with that sort of vision and those foreign connections to supply them with the materials that they need. Six is the Iranians decide they still want to be a sovereign Islamic republic and that means not having anything to do with the godless communists in China or the the ultra the the orthodox in Russia. uh and they decide that they want to maintain a distance from these key strategic partners who will of course have asks of them and and will they so surrender their sovereignty. Um if they go in that direction, they're more in the direction of Syria where Syria at the end of the day wasn't willing to let the Russians colonize it. It wasn't letting willing to let the Iranians colonize it even if though those probably were the best ways for the Assad government to survive in the long run. They wanted some level of sovereignty that limited the amount of reconstruction and and security arrangements that those key partners could provide uh for Syria. So, if they go on that road, I think that they're they're more in that direction of that lower end of of reconstruction, re rehabilitation. And I don't know where they'll go right now because I don't know if the Iranians know where they'll go right now. Um because the dust and the burn and the fires are are still burning. >> Okay. So, a big wild card here is going to be what happens with the Iranian people. and what they choose to do. And from our previous discussions, Ryan, you've explained several times that it's uh the probability of a populist uprising in Iran is is challenged and it's probably lower than a lot of Westerners imagine because it's a very fractured country in terms of um its populace and its ethnicities and uh what people want. And it's not like there's just an opposition leader waiting in the wings that the entire country would could rally behind. Um probably your best case scenario is is you would have different factions putting forth their >> their recommended leaders and there would have to be a period of time of the country figuring out well which one are we going to rally behind and obviously the very oppressive current regime isn't going to allow that that type of coordination to happen. Um, so I I guess this is just me asking you, is there is there anything new on the potential for the Iranian people to actually have a voice in this process? >> I think where you could see that gain salience is in the reconstruction process where there's a long of enough of a lull that splits emerge between the pragmatists and the hardliners. You know, uh, Masoud Peskian, the the Iranian president, one of his big stickticks was tan's about to run out of water. We need to fix this. We need to we need to make sure that we can actually provide basic uh >> and what's happening with that >> uh they're I mean at this point the >> the war can't be helping that can it? >> Absolutely. It's a big part of the reconstruction problem is is that they had pre-existing issues before the war that are worse afterwards. That debate can't take place in a national security emergency. If the national security emergency ends and it ends in a permanent way and they no longer have the narrative to turn themselves into the Middle Eastern North Korea, then pragmatists when within the system can say we have to come up with a better strategy than confrontation with the West in an open-ended sense to make sure we have water in Tyrron and we have to rebuild these factories and stuff like this. Um, and you know, remember if if Iran does align itself with Russia and China more, that doesn't mean that they're necessarily more confrontational with the West. It means that they're more subordinate to Chinese and Iran and and and Russian interests. So their great Satan narrative gets replaced with the, you know, where the BRICS alliance narrative and whatever our united front is is is what our new interests are. So um that is where I think that there could be the potential for popular change and reform. What I think we need to wait for is that day where the buses are not getting their paychecks and they care about not getting their paychecks. You know, after all, our TSA agents weren't getting their paychecks for a while. A lot of them were quitting. Um, others were sticking with the with it, believing that this would be temporary. Um, you know, but there's a lot of, you know, American soldiers, how long would they go without a paycheck if they thought it was only temporary? I think it would be a long time before they finally gave up on on national security. So, I think we need to see that happen where they can no longer provide the security forces with that economic lifeline to prevent them from like sliding into poverty. And it needs to be sustained and it needs to be to a point where these individuals are saying like Syri like Assad's fighters said, "Why am I doing this? They can't get me gas. They can't get me air conditioning. I've been doing this for 10 years. I'm tired. Um the rebels are coming. Good luck." You know, I hope they hear me. >> Um so I think that's what we still have to wait for. And I think that that's there will be another protest movement in Iran. It's guaranteed. It's part of the Iranian historical cycle. At what point do the security forces not shoot into the crowd? That will remain to be seen, but it will definitely happen. It will be much more likely to happen if we have a botched reconstruction scenario uh on the aftermath of this war. >> Okay. And just given your knowledge of the regime, what odds do you give them of of sticking the landing on the reconstruction versus botching it? >> Uh I would give them in in the direction of that six or seven, I would say. Uh and potentially on the lower end, >> even though they can't get water to their people already. >> Yeah. I mean that and that's that's where the that's where that lower end of of of because these regimes can hold on for a long time in spite of the lack of basic services. So can they stick the landing the region suggests that Saddam couldn't do it. Assad couldn't do it. Even uh Jose Mubarak couldn't really do it in Egypt with pro-American leanings. At a certain point people want butter over guns particularly in the Middle East. This is just not a conformist uh it's there's a reason communism never really took hold in the Muslim world. It's just Islam creates social structures that just don't go along with totalitarianism all that well. So if they go in that direction of totalitarianism and military first stuff, there's probably a lifpan to it that's within our lifetimes. It's just hard to tell what the trigger will necessarily. >> We just might be old men as you were saying. Yeah. >> Exactly. The other danger to that is that the Americans and the Israelis decide to intervene in the course of another protest movement and instead of aiding the protesters, now you have a national security emergency and they crush the protesters. um and and the protest movement isn't able to take take hold of the country. >> Okay. Uh one thing we didn't talk about and I don't we're gonna have time to talk about today was um President Trump actually admitted that during the protests uh the US had sent um guns to into Iran to the Kurds. Um but apparently at least per Trump that didn't get in the hands of the protesters. Um but different story for a different day. But how much of Iran's 90 million people, and there's some percentage there that are pro the regime, but I think from our past breakdown, they're a minority. Um, how many are are looking around at what's going on there and thinking, okay, we can't be winning here. like you know there's a rally around the flag effect when your country is uh attacked and I'm sure there's some of that going on while the bombs are dropping but how many are just looking around being like we can't be winning here if I'm seeing all these buildings getting taken out around me every night here in Tan um and just maybe they they already weren't you know fans of the regime so losing faith might be the wrong word but maybe maybe just getting emboldened or just getting to a a point of look, I got nothing else to lose at this point? Like h has has the bombardment of of the country made the populace any more likely to act against the regime? >> Um I don't think so in the near term. No. uh what you the what life is like in an authoritarian country and you know having lived in the Emirates and Qatar uh those are also authoritarian countries. What life is like politically is that politics basically doesn't exist. Is that you're not supposed to talk about it. You're not supposed to have an opinion of it. You are a bystander. You're a bystander to its foreign policies. You're a bystander to its crackdowns. If it does something you don't like, you stay quiet about it. That's how most Iranians are approaching this because that's how they've been socialized for many of their for their entire lives is that if they are allowed to have a political opinion, it's on very specific issues like Palestine or on the limited presidential elections, things like that they are allowed to have an opinion on. So most of them are just >> what your opinion will give it to you. Yeah, I got it. >> Yeah. So the so they most folks and I've seen a lot of what few things can come out of the country because remember the internet is shut down. the regime is controlling information. Um, not everybody is seeing bombardments all the time. You know, even in a big city like Tyrron, which is millions of people, not everybody's constantly seeing these bombardments. Um, and and so there's a way to compartmentalize this and say it's not as bad as it might seem. There's also a way to say it's not my problem. I'm not a political person. I don't I want to just go to my job. I want to go to the cafe and have coffee, etc. Um, and there's a lot of other people who are like, the believers are still dangerous. They know where I live. The Israelis don't. um if I upset the believers, they're going to come from my job, my family, my kids, etc. Um and that's how authoritarian systems function is that climate of fear and kind of stifling of opinion that allows them to carry on day-to-day. They're fatal in that at one point an event can happen that catalyzes the end of that climate of fear and then everybody comes out and overwhelms the system. It's always hard to tell what that catalyst of ending that climate of fear is going to be. The Arab Spring was a guy setting himself on fire in Tunisia and that spread across the whole region. That was very hard to predict that would happen. But the ground elements of that descent were predictable before it happened. And we know those ground elements of descent are going to be predictably uh in effect in Iran afterwards. We just don't know if the threshold is going to be high enough for a bad enough standard of living to animate people to a level to overthrow a government that has been preparing for its overthrow ever since it overthrew the last one. >> Okay. All right. Um well obviously um whatever happens we'll wish the best for the people of Iran themselves uh separate from the regime. Okay. So as we end here um let's talk about best case scenario. What should we be rooting for Ryan? >> Uh a rapid normalization of Hormuz and a rapid normalization of security conditions in the region. I think uh uh the normalization of Hormuz I think is is somewhat on the table in the next month or two. It probably requires big American concessions to the Iranians, but Iran wants to get its energy out as well. It does want to start to rebuild its relations with its Gulf Arab neighbors, which is served by normalizing Iran uh hormuz. So, I think that's one thing to root for. And the other is the rooting for normalization of security conditions. Essentially, the message being sent to the Israelis and to the hawks in the United States that they can't do a mow the grass campaign against Iran that pulls us into cycles over and over again. Um, and then kind of cobbling together what I was talking about before that that u not great but it, you know, not terrible uh containment uh strategy against the Iranians until again an Iranian Gorbachoff emerges sometime in the future. >> Okay. Um, well, let's hope for all those things, folks. So, Ryan, let's assume that all happens, right? Is the world a safer place or less safe place than it was pre the war? uh if the best case scenario happens and we end up with an Iranian Gorbachoff and and Iran >> Okay. Yeah. Yeah. >> Um if we end up with a containment, there's a lot of implications that we have to pull apart here because China's looking at this war with its drone and missile arsenal and thinking about Taiwan. The Russians of course are looking at whether or not the southern flank in the Persian Gulf is a good way to distract the Europeans and the Americans from what it cares about in Eastern Europe. Um and of course the American public itself is asking the question of why do we globally police anything? Uh shouldn't we just be bothering with only within our borders? Um so the answer of whether or not the world is safer, I don't think the world will ever be at that point where you have 1990s style safety. I think you are entering a multipolar environment in which conflict and chaos will be compartmentalized to specific parts of the world and you'll just have to get better at reading the map and and seeing that the way that you know Thailand and Cambodia are fighting this week now it's you know Peru and Bolivia the next you know it's going to be these conflicts that you no longer thought were were possible on the map but are becoming normalized through this process and I've seen it described as not a world war but a world at war as we shift over to an environment where there's not a great superpower balancer that puts out all the fires. I think more fires will happen, but they won't be a global fire and they'll require adjustments and adaptation as they break out from time to time. >> Okay. Um, last question on this. So again, let's say we get everything we you you know, you you you say we should hope for in the near term here, right? So you know, peace deal struck under the best terms we can hope for. In your opinion, America versus the rest of the world is America looked to as the country that did the right thing and showed that it's got incredibly unmatched military might and um I want America is my buddy. Um or is it more like uh America is a bully. Uh it it broke a lot of its previous alliances. You know, is America stronger strengthened or weakened by this? If if we get the peace terms that you would most like to see, >> uh if we got the best case scenario, I think that you would end up with with a world that would say America's a destabilizing risktaker, still willing to to uh to take these sorts of actions that may have dire consequences in the short term, but in the long term things pan out. That might be the conclusion that countries come away with. Uh especially if Iran and the GCC can ever rehabilitate their ties. the GCC is in the midst of a of a massive debate as to whether or not America is reliable or not uh over this war. But if things end up with the Islamic Republic, you know, no longer existing, then they'll be able to say that was dangerous, but that was worth it in the end. On the other hand, I think the more realistic thing is two things will be true. Is that America is still a paramount military power that doesn't have the political will to see through its campaigns. And I think that's the most likely thing that a lot of of of countries are going to observe from this war, including the Chinese, the Russians, our GCC partners, the Israelis, etc. And they'll adapt to that. And and you know, for China, that might say we can't go a full ground invasion against Taiwan. Because if we do, the Americans are going to stop us. We just saw what they could do against similar systems in Iran. On the other hand, what if we just find a way to crash their stock market routinely through a blockade of Taiwan? That might make them actually give up on the island. So they're going to adjust their strategies um in in reaction to that perception that America's political will is not there, but our military and technological capabilities are. >> Okay. Yeah. Which which you know sounds like it may make us more feared in certain ways um but also embolden some others too that hey there there there's vulnerable parts of its underbelly. But what you just described there makes me think that allies would be, you know, more nervous of us coming out of this than before, >> especially for long conflicts. I I think that NATO will be able to say if the Russians ever send bombers into Poland, the Americans will shoot them, almost all of them down and beat the Russian air force. And as long as it's a it's a month-long campaign, the Americans will be there for us and and really, you know, protect our skies. If the Russians can somehow do that over two years, the Americans don't have the the the political will for it, they will eventually cut a deal that will undermine our sovereignty um because their system just can't handle those sorts of World War II style uh lifestyle sacrifices that would be necessary for such a conflict. Um so I think it'll be two different conclusions is like get the Americans involved in short conflicts. Don't let them get bogged down in long ones. They can't do that anymore. Um buy their hardware, but don't trust them to necessarily make decisions that are always in your best interest. Um, and don't always look at them as a stabilizing force. They will be erratic. They will be experimental. They will be risktakers. And sometimes that will pan out and sometimes it won't. >> Okay. All right. Well, look, Ryan, um, whenever you're on, I I always say um I hope it's a while before we have you on again because that means hopefully things are going better in the world. Um, can't thank you enough for this. I wanted to share some comments here. Um, this one person says, "Absolutely brilliant stuff. best insight into the various outcomes and scenarios I've seen from anyone. Um I I I I very much appreciate that feedback and again that's 1% me is the guy just tossing the pitches and 99% Ryan is the guy who's actually swinging the bat. Um but thank you Ryan and you know I think the the the point that I just want to underscore here is you know a lot of people are feeling that like look I don't get kind of this deep nuance discussion in the regular media. It's either something that is, you know, highly biased that is trying to play to one part of the hyperpolarized factions that are out there or it's TV and, you know, not only is there bias there, but it's just sound bites, right? And and you really help us dig deeply into the weeds and see this from from a whole variety of different perspectives, Ryan. And I really appreciate um your your ability to do that. There was one or two other ones I wanted to pull up here. Um this one here, same deal. Definitely worthwhile discussion irrespective of your point of view. You know, again, what we're trying to do here, folks, is is not come at this from any particular partisan or biased standpoint. Um we're just trying to see it as completely as as we can around all the different perspectives. And again, Ryan, you've been a fantastic source for that. So, thank you. >> Well, I I appreciate it. Again, this is great to do this kind of external facing stuff. Um, I'm now starting to work on a bit of a manuscript about the geopolitical uh net assessment of the Middle East to just see if I can get uh a little bit more of that narrative out there because I think people still fall into the the good guys versus bad guys stuff rather than interests versus compulsions versus constraints. Um, and hopefully I can add to the discourse on that on a more substantial level. >> Oh wow. Well, yeah, if if and when that manuscript is an actual publication, let us know. You come back on here. I'm sure we got a bunch of people. >> We'll see how it goes. You know, these things are This is not easy, but I'll let you know. >> All right. Well, folks, couple quick things as we end up here. Um, please let Ryan know how much you appreciate him coming on and doing all this for us. Uh, both in the the live chat if you're watching live in the comment section below if you're watching the comments. Um, definitely hit the like button if you haven't already. Um, and if you would like to see us do more of this, not just in the specific case of Iran, uh, but in other u key developments in the world, like we had Mario Braa, um, who is one of Ryan's colleagues there, come on and talk with us about both Venezuela and Cuba. If you'd like to see more of these type of special reports around breaking developments in the world, um, hit the subscribe button as well as that little bell icon right next to it. And we will do more of these in the future. Ryan, for folks that would like to follow you and your work in between now and your next appearance on this channel, where should they go? >> Um, I'm I'm pretty active on X these days. That's been very useful for this conflict. >> Yeah, I'm glad you become more active there, by the way. I really enjoy following you. >> The the for you function isn't as bad as people said, so I'm actually getting the content that I want. Uh, and I'll still post some long forms on LinkedIn. And of course, our website, uh, rainnetwork.com is where our our substantial analysis is. That's where our forecasts that we just published for Q2 have have just come out that includes scenarios for uh the Iran conflict as well as Israel's strategy going forward. Uh the GCC's adaptation strategies. Um so that's where the bulk of my work is is always going to be at the red network.com. >> All right. Fantastic. And you know, Ryan, I'm going to totally um lie to you. Uh I I was going to wrap it up, but I realized there's a key question I had didn't ask you that unfairly just give us your 60-cond version of this. um oil prices. So, we've seen oil prices come down pretty dramatically given the news of last night's ceasefire. Um what do you think is the most likely trajectory for oil prices from here? >> It it looks like there's >> Can't believe I didn't ask you that earlier. Sorry. >> Yeah, of course. Uh, and I'm not an oil analyst in and of myself in and of itself, so I I can't tell you about the transactions, the very nuanced ways that these prices are set, but broadly speaking, it does look like there's still some more slack, at least in the United States, for more supply destruction before the oil market panics. Um, I tend to think that it's a bit on the enabling side of of the way that the market is treating these prices of assuming that things are are they really want to grasp onto the idea that this is a short war. And I don't think that that's a safe assumption to make at this point. Like I said, I think the thing that's going to kick off a panic of sorts is in a major industrialized nation taking energy saving measures that impact its GDP outlook. And and I don't know if that's necessarily going to happen, but at the end of April is when some organizations like JP Morgan have said Japan, South Korea, Europe, they're going to have to start doing some version of this. Um, and if that happens, that's where I think our markets will finally say now it's serious. Now supply destruction has taken place. I can no longer plan for December for oil prices to be back at $70 uh for WTI. >> Okay. All right. I'm sorry I didn't give you a chance to answer that more fully earlier on. And if things continue to get bumpy from here, we'll dig into it the next time you're on. >> Of course. Of course. Um yeah, again, it's always great to join you, Adam. Your audience is fantastic. So, it's always a a great discussion. >> All right. Well, thank you, my friend. All right. And everybody else, thanks so much for watching.
Iran War Nearing The End? | Ryan Bohl, RANE
Summary
Transcript
and we should be live. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Tagert, welcoming you here for yet another special report on the situation in Iran. We got a lot to talk about today and we're joined as usual by Rain M East geopolitical strategist Ryan B. Ryan, thanks so much for joining us again today. I'm sure this has got to be another crazy week for you. >> Yeah, absolutely. and and last night was another turnabout of of this dynamic and uh it's certainly not over uh this morning. >> Okay. So yeah, when I reached out to uh schedule this with you, we were facing the ticking clock of the President Trump's uh you know, deadline basically. Hey, you know, come to the table or else uh we're going to unleash hell on Iran. Um fortunately, we now have a ceasefire. Um we'll see how long it holds. Um but I guess let's let's start with this. Um what do we know so far about the ceasefire? What should we expect from it? And um do you personally expect it to hold? >> So the only part of the ceasefire that seems to be holding right now is the US not conducting air strikes on Iran. We've already seen in the past 12 hours uh yeah I think it is been about the past 12 hours uh Israeli escalation against Lebanon Hezbollah. Uh there have been strikes inside of Iran on Iranian uh energy facilities. There have been Iranian retaliation against Kuwait, Bahrain, and then most recently that critical east west pipeline in Saudi Arabia to uh between the eastern province and Yamu on the Red Sea uh has also been attacked. Um, and I I think I did mention the Emiradis have been attacked and the and the uh uh Iranian state media has said that Hormuz was open for about 10 minutes uh and that they've closed it again uh because of Israeli aggression within Lebanon. Um it doesn't look like the markets have have kind of internalized this news. What they're looking at is the ceasefire process and the diplomatic process going forward. Um this is extremely untenable. What's what's currently happening? The Iranians came up with a 15-point ceasefire plan that they sent to the Americans and Trump said, "We can work with this." Even though all of their demands were non-starters for the Americans. And >> just to be clear, theirs is theirs is 10 points, right? Ours is the 15. >> Yes, that's right. Ours is. Well, the issue is right now, we don't know on the Iranian side, are they sticking with their 10 to 15 points officially in Islamabad when the talks begin? Uh because it is entirely possible that the delegation that goes to Islamabad on Friday comes with new demands, older demands. We know some of their core demands are things like uh uranium enrichment, probable control of the straight of Hormuz, the end of Israeli attacks on their proxies, and of course a durable ceasefire uh with the US and Israel that guarantees that there's no future war. Um so what the number of points perhaps doesn't matter as much as the the bigger substance of what the Iranians are trying to get out of this, which is full-scale security on the energy front, on the economic front, the nuclear front, and of course physical security. Um, and it doesn't look like right now they believe they had need to offer any concessions and and for that matter the Americans under the Trump administration believe that their uh, you know, ceasefire demands are are at least going to be discussed and met in some capacity in Islamabad. Um, and it doesn't there doesn't seem to be any reason for this optimism other than the fact that it's it's largely aspirational ceasefire dynamics is the way I would describe it is that the Trump administration decided to pause whatever shock and awe campaign that they had planned to start last night and they still plan to to uh carry out in the next few days if Islamabad doesn't go well. Um that seems to be the only thing that's been halted on this because on every other front the war is continuing relatively the same way it was uh on Monday and Tuesday. >> Okay. Um real quick, when are the Salamabad talks supposed to start? >> Supposed to be on Friday. Uh we're getting lots of leaks as to who may or may not go, which tells us how serious these talks are. There's rumors that the uh Iranian parliamentary speaker uh will be going and he's he's a guy who's attached to the IRGC but isn't exactly in charge of it. It may be a lower level designation because they're worried about Israeli assassinations if they decide to leave the country or travel. >> Um so who goes to Islamabad will matter. Uh the other or the other on the American side is is the rumors that it'll be either be JD Vance, uh Steve Whit or or Jared Kushner. Now, if it's WhitF and Kushner, the Iranians don't trust them because they've done several rounds of talk to these guys and it's resulted in war. JD Vance is supposed to be a dove in comparison to the rest of the administration. Um, and there is some signs the Iranians may be willing to trust him a bit more. But for that matter, Vance may end up going to these talks and then concluding that the Iranians are playing more games and having to come back and resume the war. And that's going to damage his dent uh his his dovish reputation that he's kind of counting on for 2028. So, nothing is firm yet. We have to keep a really close eye on who's going to understand how serious these talks are. or is this a traditional Middle Eastern ceasefire process that is the worst escalations are contained but the war is put into a box that allows the combatants to kind of fight each other to a stalemate. >> Okay. Um All right. Uh so I mean it's super early in the ceasefire right now and one could make the argument look it's going to take a day or two for everybody to get the memo that there's a ceasefire probably especially in Iran where the communications have been compromised and stuff like that but it doesn't to the toe I'm getting from you is it's not just guys that haven't gotten the memo yet it's it's active uh intent on both sides to to still be hitting each other. >> Yeah. And with the exception again of the Americans holding off for now. Uh how long that's going to last, I don't know. I have seen evidence that the US is still rushing in KC7 tankers and and there's an artillery brigade that's being sent out to the Middle East as well. So there are still troops being sent and and assets being sent. It is also entirely possible that what the Trump administration really wanted from this two-week ceasefire is to build up assets for a more thorough shock and a hall campaign because they have used up a lot of their assets. The F-15 shootown was an indication that the current assets are getting worn out and are starting to make mistakes. So they they may have needed a tactical pause to make the shock and awe campaign threat credible. After all, I'd never considered that Trump would actually drop a nuclear weapon on Iran. There's just no rationality behind that even for him. And of course in the first term he threatened to nuke uh North Korea more or less every other week if we recall in 2017 and 2018 that was all part of his rhetorical madmen political strategy. He's very comfortable making those sorts of threats. Um and it's important to note that with North Korea the outcome of that was just the status quo ante. All he got was a photo op out of the North Koreans, but he certainly didn't denuclearize them and he didn't get sanctions relief. But he seems to believe it was a successful political strategy and uh he seems to be trying it again with the Iranians. >> Okay, I got a ton of questions for you, but let me just address this one that someone just asked. Where's this guy get his info? Um, so h, you know, how are you keeping as up to date on this as you are as a M East analyst? >> So, uh, I'm an open source intelligence analyst. That's that's my, uh, my base role. in addition to the the geopolitical forecasting that my organization does and that I take part in which includes scenario building. Um again we were we were trained by intelligence community folks to to do this kind of work but most of our information comes from the same sources that you all can grab uh from the open source uh networks that exist uh social media traditional media you know your Reuters and associated presses New York Times and of course Iranian state media right now actually does have relevancy normally you don't necessarily look at Tasmin uh to to try to figure out what Iran's next moves are but if we were to understand if they said yes to this ceasefire we needed to start reading that as well. So you've got to go to your primary sources in some cases. Uh and you have to have the intelligence training to kind of discern signal versus noise. You don't always get it right. Neither does CIA or MI6. Um but those are the jobs that you basically have to do is is ascertain signal versus noise uh through these many different sources. >> All right. Does rain have in region sources or in uh administration or in military you know US military sources as well? >> Uh one of our guys is you know one of our analysts is based in Lebanon. uh he is currently watching the air strikes outside of his window. So we and we have some sales people and business people in the Gulf Arab states um and I have lots of contacts with journalists uh you know when I do my outreach stuff you know through Bloomberg, CNBC, TRT World, Alzer etc. So I keep in contact with a lot of those folks but again they usually don't say things that aren't already being said in public and or aren't being published by themselves. Um so it's not secret networks so to speak. um that's not as effective for a private organization as it used to be when uh people are able to publish on to X or Blue Sky or or any or leaked to the New York Times and get their voice out there at a much wider audience a lot faster. >> Okay. All right. So, uh let's get into this. So you you had said that the 10 points uh that the Iranian regime has put out uh that they want are kind of non-starters. And that was my I'm not a professional analyst like you, but that that was sort of my initial interpretation is like I can't believe that Trump would agree to any of these. Now in his recent treat social post, Trump did say, "Oh, we think this is a a basis for a framework to to to you for discussion going forward." A little surprised by that, but who knows? Maybe he's just being time, buying time and saying, "Hey, we'll all get in a room and see what happens, right?" Um, what's been uh talked about a lot this morning and again on truth by Trump uh has been the uranium part, right? So when you look at what the the administration has said sort of four main military objectives were, and if I'm doing this from memory, but number one was prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon. Number two was, you know, um, you know, basically degrade their ballistics capabilities, degrade their ability to make more ballistics, and then I think the other one was like render their air force and navy inoperative, something like that. And and they pretty much done those those last three, the nuclear one is the big question, right? And then Trump was referring to the dust in his most recent uh truth post basically kind of giving the impression that the 450 kg or whatever of enriched uranium that Iran supposedly has is not in some you know some bunker that the Iranians are guarding. it's, you know, basically under the rubble of what was blown up during mid Operation Midnight Hammer and that the US with the Iranians will go in at some point in the future collectively get it and presumably the US will extract it and and take it out of Iran. >> A, is that your best understanding of what's going on? and and B, you know, what what because this whole thing sort of seemed to have started around concerns around Iran eventually getting to a nuke. Do you see the US as actually being able to credibly get to a point where it can say, "Yes, we took Iran's enriched uranium away." >> Uh, I don't think that there's there's a a viable path to do that at the moment. The the Islamic Republic isn't going to give up its enriched uranium, whether it's buried or dispersed or in new secret sites. And remember, part of the reason Trump says these things is this is what his intelligence uh folks are telling him. This is where we think that these things are. But to verify the actual location of the uranium requires on the ground uh deep inspections that they they aren't able to do. They there's MSAD and CIA running all over Iran right now. That doesn't mean they can dig down deep into the ground to discover where this enriched Iranian is. This is based on an assumption that it was buried and that it wasn't moved out to other locations and that the Iranians don't necessarily have other secret locations. So, it's not clean assumptions that even if you can get to these these areas that they know uh that that's all of Iran Iran's stockpile or that that will permanently take it away. It also requires we saw this F-15 uh operation to get the airmen out. Very impressive from a tactical standpoint. They still lost significant amounts of equipment, but they didn't lose any lives, and they did achieve their objective. To do this with the enriched uranium under fire strikes me as physically impossible. Uh it would require for the US to take and hold territory in the center of Iran for days, if not weeks, depending on how complicated the operation is. Um and you know, thinking back to the Biden administration where they tried to build that pier for humanitarian aid off the coast of Gaza, uh and it didn't work. They kept falling apart on them. that insight into how complicated such physical operations are. You know, it's one thing to pull a person out of a location and then be one and done with it. It's another thing to have to build the infrastructure needed to dig down into the ground to find this enriched uranium and get it out of there while the Iranians know exactly where you are. They know exactly where you're going to go and they know your probable air routes. That's a lot more of a tricky operation that can only be accomplished if there's some sort of political agreement that Iran under this government is simply not going to agree to. >> All right. So, so basically if it is buried under the mountain uh that was mountain facility that was destroyed during uh Midnight Hammer, the only way to get it is going to be a joint cooperative effort between Iran and the US. US isn't going to get it commando style in your opinion? >> Yeah, exactly. Or or another you could also get a UN organization, you know, a UN angle here. the Russians might be more of a trustworthy partner in a in a final political agreement in order to uh to to find this uranium and put it into kind of a safe predictable place. But the issue is the Iranians don't want to give up their sovereignty at all. Not even to the Russians who they trust comparatively on their nuclear program. After all, they're helping the Russians are helping run their their civilian nuclear program as we speak. Um that still the Iranians don't want to give up that sovereignty to the Russians who after all were once a historical rival. >> Okay. Um, so was I interpreting your tone correctly? Uh, that right now the difference between our 15 points and Iran's 15 points is pretty vast. >> Yes. >> Points. I'm sorry. >> I would call it a challenge in and the way that they are seeing how this conflict comes to end. Now remember, Trump has always shown in his negotiation process a great deal of flexibility. You know, he says the maximalist thing. You know, he's used car salesman that says it's $200,000 and then he comes down to $2,000. uh something like that that that's that's long been his approach. So I I expect he'll show some flexibility. The problem is we're already seeing reports from Senate Republicans that they hate uh the stipulations that might come with this ceasefire deal. So and meanwhile the doves aren't assured that this is going to get the United States out of this conflict. So, it's a really it's a struggle for the administration to find a policy that doesn't alienate a significant part of their base while continuing to drive away another part of their base because half of the Republican base very much wants to finish off the Iranians as a threat and the other half wants to end all of America's involvement in the Middle East. This is sort of an irreconcilable political position and in many ways it's an irreconcilable strategic position because you can either go back to containment with the Iranians and hope that the Iranian uh government eventually collapses of its own inequities or you can take it on full scale and pay in high blood and treasure to try to finish the job immediately. Doing both through the middle is kind of what we did in Vietnam and is why the United States ended up in a quagmire there because it never did stick to full strategy in either direction. All right. I I I want to actually dig into some of those military options in a bit. Um but right now, what what is non-negotiable in your mind for the US? Um I presume it's got to be we got to get the uranium somehow or at least some way to really claim victory that we've set you back from getting a nuke by a long time. And I'm guessing free flow through the straight of Hormuz. I'm guessing leaving the straight of Hormuz in Iran's hands as a choke point toll booth is is probably non-negotiable too, but you tell me. >> Well, you know, and Trump is signaling that hormuz may not be so non-negotiable if the US gets a cut of some kind. Uh I don't know how that would necessarily work. The Americans may show some flexibility on Hormuz to see some sort of Hormuz protocol uh be negotiated. The biggest hurdle to a home's protocol would be the Gulf Arab states themselves who don't want to see this this channel choked off. They using significant diplomatic and political and even economic resources to try to sabotage such an agreement. And remember these agreements do exist in other places. Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia have one for the Straits of Mala. Turkey obviously controls the Dardell where they have the Montro treaty. A maritime protocol is something that can be doable under international law. And maybe all it does is say, well, if Iran ever comes under attack, they're allowed to close it off. That could be something that the Americans could possibly go along with under certain circumstances. The Gulf Arabs can't. They don't want any sort of prospect that now Hormuz could be choked off by a formal mechanism that they can't counter. So that's the that's the big problem is so hormuz is probably your biggest most complicated non-starter because so many other actors have have a say in it. The uranium, as you mentioned, is another one that the Americans are after. The Israelis are after that even more. So, that's another complication is that if the Americans agree to allow the Iranians to hold it in some low-level enrichment, you know, a version of Obama's nuclear deal, the Israelis now have the president where they can strike Iran at will to try to destroy that program that undo undoes all of your diplomatic progress. Um, and then other things like the ballistic missiles, the uh proxies, those also are non-starters for certain Republicans. For more restrained isolationist Republicans, they are less of non-starters. They don't see them necessarily as big of a threat. It's it's just that I think that there's an enormous there's such a weak consensus now on what to do with Iran, how urgent Iran is, and whether or not it is worth what we've currently gone through or could go through. that I think is making it hard for to fully understand what is a true non-starter for the United States versus something that the Trump administration will try to come up with some sort of flexible approach that might end up like the status quo ante but some sort of flexible approach that allows the US to exit the conflict. >> Okay. So, so many things that want to ask you about here. Um I hope you're strapped in, right? Um so you mentioned the Gulf States, right? Um, I have got to think, and again, please correct me if I'm wrong because I'm just some armchair amateur here, but my sense is the Gulf States have got to be like, okay, we we we can't go back to the status quo. Uh, what would happen before all this? Iran has has shown its true stripes. It's going to target us whenever it feels pressured. Um, we can't deal with that anymore. So, in my opinion, they're going to exchange as much of their treasure as they need to, and they got a lot of it to really armor up and and uh you know, increase their offensive capabilities as well so that the Gulf neighbor states begin to become a deterrent against Iran, right? To say, "Hey, if you anything like this again, not only going to hopefully call our buddies, the the Americans to come help us, but we're going to have enough missiles and stuff here that you're going to really regret it, Iran." Um my sense too is that they will take their treasure and go to the rest of the world that depends on the straight oil, Europe, Asia, and say, "Look, you guys are stakeholders in this right along with us. We need some sort of international flotilla police force to, you know, keep the straits working smoothly and we'll we'll happily pay for it. It's in our it's in our interests. You know, if you're you're worried about your military spending, don't worry. We'll write big checks." Um am I near the mark here? I mean, do do the both those things seem potentially credible drivers of what comes out of this? >> Um, so yes, I would say yes and no, as we're going to do with the anal analyst thing. Um, the GCC is not a monolith, right? There are hawks against the Iranians like the UAE in Bahrain believes that that Iran can never be trusted ever again and that the ultimate goal should be regime change there. Then Oman and Qatar are still in that camp of we can still live and let live with a version of Iran. We just got to get the Americans and the Israelis off their back so we can live and let live with whatever version of Iran is going to exist. And then we have >> and they feel cutter still feels that way after getting its gas fields blown up. >> Even now the Qataris continue to signal prime minister has said as much where they believe that they can find a diplomatic framework to work again with the Iranians and resume some level of trade. They have to share South Pars uh gas field no matter what. There there's there's nothing they can do about that that sharing function. So they are forced into that position by that basic geography. Um and the Saudis are stuck in a place where they have half a mind of wanting the hawkish approach and half a mind of wanting the dovish approach. And I don't think there's a consensus within Saudi about how they want this to be done. Um because they're the most exposed. And if you're talking about this idea of turning the Gulf Arab states into a more effective military deterrent against the Iranians, it has to be Saudi Arabia that takes on the bulk of that that burden. Their population is the largest. Most Gulf Arab states are mostly foreigners with the exception of Oman uh and the southis. The Emiratis are not going to be uh conscripting a bunch of Indian laborers to be part of of a landing force for their their disputed islands in the Gulf Arab states or the in the Persian Gulf. They're going to be relying on a few thousand elite Emirati troops that if they endure, you know, a few dozen casualties, that's the end of the war for the Emiratis. They can't fight for very long uh because of their small population. So the Saudis know that if they're going to do the conventional deterrence game, they are the ones who are going to have to suffer the casualties just like they have in Yemen where where hundreds of Saudi soldiers have been killed uh in the course of the 10-year intervention in that country. Um and they are looking for non US sources. Now they're preferring non US NATO or major non-NATO ally sources like South Korea, uh Turkey, the Israelis, the French, the Germans, the Brits. Those are places where you will see uh Gulf Arab sovereign wealth funds start to dump some of their investment money into to get better air defenses, better jets, um better tanks, etc. from non US sources because they would like to reduce their reliance on the Americans. They can't do it very quickly. This is a decadesl long process that they're going to have to do because they have to retrain their forces on this hardware. But it was something they were doing before and I think it will accelerate afterwards. And the Ukrainians are another place that are going to get a boon out of this. the Gulf Arab states are going to dump a fair bit of money to the Ukrainians in exchange for Ukrainian air defense knowhow um and and intelligence sharing against this mutual you know Iran's uh Russian military alliance or mil you it would be a formal alliance but that military relationship is so deep that the two can now cooperate um now in terms of can they get a flotillaa into hormuz I think the answer is still no uh and the answer is still no in part because if the Americans can't do it no No one else has the conventional capability to replace that American counterweight. Uh the British and French navies are not what they were. The the German navy is very small. So Europe doesn't really have a capability and many Europeans simply don't have an appetite to open up a front in the Middle East when the Russians are still moving on Ukraine. There's a there's a great fear of of Europe straining their defense budgets and and committing themselves to too much. The same with the uh with Asia where they're more worried about China than they are with Hormuz. And there's still an implicit assumption that Hormuz will in some form or another normalize. And when it normalizes, it will leave out those countries. Uh it will, you know, it will when it normalizes, it will probably be designed to have leverage over the Americans. It doesn't necessarily have to be designed to have leverage over the Europeans or the East Asians. And I think that's still part of the calculus of wanting to remain outside of this war. >> Okay. So, let me dig into that just a little bit. So the these other countries Europe, Asia, etc. strong economic interest dependency on getting hormuz normalized, right? Um in other words, if if it remained choked off, eventually they'd have to take some action, right? Because they're they're suffering so much economically from it going on. Um, so one would think that they would want to get involved and either try to, you know, negotiate whatever the solution is or, you know, say, hey, look, we're we're happy to contribute something to to reopen this thing, right? Not not necessarily as an as an aggressive kinetic forced opening, but like, yeah, we'll we'll all be part of our a flotilla there. And of course, the deterrence of that isn't necessarily the flotillaa itself. Sure, it's probably still vulnerable going through the straits to whatever Iran might want to throw at it, but it's a much greater risk because if you do, if you attack it, well, then you're not just going against America, you're going against, you know, perhaps a much larger multinational military coalition. >> Um, does that have deterred value in and of itself? >> I don't think it does anymore. It it would have perhaps before this war. Um, the Israelis and Americans have kind of already unleashed a lot of their worst against the Iranians. uh there's not a lot that the Europeans can bring that would be a significant qualitative impact on the Iranians. Um and there's also there's also this this realization from these these European states that if they get attacked by the IRGC, now they're trapped in a conflict that they didn't start that is with that was unpopular in Europe and it's unpopular in America and is dragging them along the path of of a coalition of the unwilling, so to speak. there there all of these European politicians highly mindful of Tony Blair's legacy for going into Iraq alongside George W. Bush is a volunteer and his government was eventually, you know, pulled down and the discredited. If they end up being a combatant in this conflict, even if they do reopen Hormuz, it could be the end of their political careers and potentially the end of their ruling party's power for a very long time because most Europeans, they won't eventually conclude, oh, you got my energy back. They'll conclude, you dragged us into an un, you know, another endless war that we didn't want alongside a president that we don't particularly like. So, there's not a lot of political upsides to get involved. Instead, what I think the Europeans would do is is they would do a form of they're going to, of course, rely on their energy reserves, you know, their their strategic petroleum reserves, strategic gas reserves, and they're going to drag that up for as long as they can. If they have to, they'll get to that point that we're already seeing in the Middle East and subsaharan Africa of beginning rationing. And I think that's where we will see that is kind of one of the key indicators that I'm looking at as the market panic moment of of of a major industrial country formally rationing saying the lights are off from six to six something like that the way that we've already seen in Cairo. You know those countries are big economies but they are not connected to the global media or economic uh system the way that say Paris or Seoul or Tokyo is. Um, and I don't know if we'll get there, but I think that that's the indicator that we'll need to see for your moment of like the the market waking up and saying, "Wait a second, this is structurally happening now. We can't possibly ignore this." And then your paper traders finally catch up to your your actual supply traders uh in terms of price. >> Okay. And I get your point about Europe's reluctance here. um the fact that uh Iran sent that uh mid-range missile um that basically let the world know that hey they've actually got the technology now to send missiles you know basically as far as like Oslo therefore covering most of Europe. Um that that right now isn't a uh potential game-changing political development where they might say hey we got to get a little bit more involved now because we're more were more exposed than we maybe thought before. >> If there was a significant quantity of these missiles, I think so. But again, the Europeans have such a pacifistic political tradition and they're so focused on the Russians that it's hard for them to think of these things like two or three steps ahead of like this is a developing threat and it's better to nip it from the bud now. They much prefer from a political and strategic standpoint to be reactive. And we keep seeing this again and again where the Russians have outflanked the Europeans for, you know, 15 some odd years with with different aggressive moves and the Europeans, you know, react to that and say, don't do it again and there's not significant enough penalties or counterreactions to prevent uh the next step of Russian aggression. And I think the Iranians are calculating that that Europe, you know, an older continent, heavily in debt, very big welfare spending. Uh it just doesn't have the political will to get engaged in this kind of conflict. In fact, it does seem like the external actor that we should be looking at more is seems to be China who who was instrumental with convincing the Iranians to very least say yes to this ceasefire, at least according to reporting we've seen as of last night. Now, of course, Iran said yes because we won. But it's still the same yes that China needs to see for energy prices to moderate to take some pressure off of their own economy. So, in terms of external involvement, it looks like it's Beijing that's starting to take those steps towards we have to do something about this. it's hitting us now. What can we do? >> Okay. And and the So, Beijing's uh incentive to wanting to get this thing resolved and stepping in like it like it has, as you just said. Is that because its oil flows have been crimped and so it's it's feeling the same pressures as everybody else. It's paying more for oil and maybe it's having some supply tightness, >> right? The you know, remember that China is where a lot of the Middle East's physical oil, like it's a global market. we all trade on the same price but the physical oil mostly goes to Asia and a lot of it goes to China and that's both Iranian and Saudi oil. So there's been a physical uh impact in China that we have not seen in the United States and won't see in the United States because of the small amount of Middle Eastern oil that we now import. >> So that is one of the reasons that China has had a greater impetus to try to find a way to create a hole for energy supplies to resume to China because it's impacting them earlier and we've seen jet fuel prices skyrocket throughout Asia. Flight prices are skyrocketing around Asia. Countries like Thailand and Malaysia are already starting their energy rationing programs and most of it's voluntary, but it's energy rationing. So, they need to do it first just because the sphere of the earth means that uh you know tankers that left for China were the ones that you know they arrived earliest and their replacements are the ones to not arrive the soonest. >> Okay. Um All right. I'm gonna I'm gonna throw what might be a crazy idea out there and feel free to tell me how terrible this is, but it it's come up in a couple recent discussions I've had. It was sort of a thought I had on the fly about a week or more ago, and I don't think I bounced it off of you yet. Um, so oil exports out of the Gulf um represent something like 85% of the income to the Iranian regime. I think I've seen, correct me if that's wrong, but you're nodding as I'm saying this. Okay. Um, so if we could basically cut off that income, right, we would economically suffocate uh Iran and presumably the regime would capitulate, right? Um, that's one of the reasons why Carg Island has been such a flash point here, right? Where the US has said, well, we could obviously bomb it and just take it off the the game board here. Um but that would hurt the people of Iran a lot more permanently than than we would like to do, right? We're fighting the regime, not the people. Uh the president has said, "Well, I could, you know, maybe, you know, take it over, right, with Marines, but then of course that's boots on the ground, and that's the Marines concentrated in the, you know, single location where they could be targeted by Iranian ballistics. Uh very unpopular at home, right? So here's my idea. Rather than deal with the the kill zone of the straits putting boots on the ground, whatever they're destroying energy infrastructure, we've got our navy parked in the Arabian Sea. Why don't we just wait for the tankers with Iranian oil to come out of the straits and then interdict them and just basically put it in an embargo and tell China, "Hey, you know what? We're not forever stealing your oil here, but it's a war. We're doing this because we got to we got to choke off our enemy here. um you're going to get it when the war is over. We're just going to park it here for you. And if you need supply in the near term, we'll happily sell it to you. We'll send US tankers to you, China, so you you're you still get your oil, but we effectively still economically strangle the regime. What what's terrible about that idea? >> Well, so there are some downsides, but I am I'll agree with you, Adam. I'm surprised the US didn't start this in the initial phase, even before the bombing, grabbing Iranian tankers like they did with Venezuela was something we discussed as a team. >> Exactly. We just did this. Yeah, >> it was a likely option. Now, it wasn't a perfect option, but it was a way to signal the Iranians, we are going to strangle you without destroying your supplies, and therefore, you don't need to do supply destruction across the Gulf in retaliation. You need to come up with a smarter counter. You need to find a way to to, you know, to to offer us concessions. It seemed like a smarter option um a month of plus. Now, if you do it now, it would feed into the energy so shock concerns because now Iran's retaliation would have to be the supply destruction we're now seeing creeping through the Gulf Arab states. We still don't know how bad the supply destruction has been so far. It can certainly get worse. Um, that East West pipeline, is that knocked off for a week or a month or a year? We don't know uh as of this morning, but if that 5 million or so, 6 million or so barrels per day going east west can't do that anymore for a long amount of time, oil prices are going to have to go up. So the Iranians have the option to do this to make this even worse and to strike these targets even more thoroughly than they have because we do have some evidence that they have retained and have have held in reserve some of their more advanced capabilities that they were preparing for this scenario where they needed to carry out more precise supply destruction. So now that we're in a war scenario, the risk is if you do the blockade, it is better than in in a lot of ways from a risk standpoint than boots on the ground. It doesn't involve Iranian supply destruction. It does still push up the price of oil because Iranian oil is part of the reason that oil prices haven't gone haywire, but it now puts the IRGC in a position where they say they're grabbing our oil. We have to destroy everything in Saudi Arabia, in the UAE, etc., including their pipelines, and they may have the capability to get pretty close to that. So that's why it seems like the administration has been hesitant on on this is knowing that they could push the Iranians in the supply destruction uh area. The other is that it just may not have been raised to the president. And so what I've seen some of the New York Times reporting of people in the room when this was being discussed for the war plans with Netanyahu and General Kaine and others, it may not have come up at all as an option. It seems like Trump was very highly focused on the Israeli war plan uh rather than what they just did in Venezuela. Other than the fact that he believed Venezuela was a great success. So there are two factors. It could make things worse especially at this point and the other is that it just might not have come up um in the course of the war planning. >> I I I have trouble believing the latter. Not that you may not be right, but I have trouble believing the latter. Not because I think this is such a phenomenal idea that no one's ever thought of. It's quite the contrary. you know, when you hear like the generals being interviewed on on TV, as I'm sure you you've said, you know, they basically say, "Look, it's ridiculous to think that America didn't think about, you know, Iran taking control of the straight because they're like, we have war gamed going to war against Iran since the 80s." Like, I'm sure they have thought of every single permutation and run all the statistics on which, you know, developments would have the the greatest uh likelihood of success. Um, so maybe they've run this one and it and it and it hasn't. Um, but I I still haven't really figured out why it's not superior to a lot of the things that we're talking about. And and I get your point that okay, that might be the line that Iran just says we got to go scorch the earth on everybody. But I don't know. Um, because a we could say look, hey, if you start doing that, we will bomb Car Island and we will bomb all of your electrical facilities and your bridges and like like Iran, we we've won. we've got our boot on your neck here because we we we we're taking your oil. We've drunk your milkshake and if you just start wantingly trying to destroy everybody in your region, um we're just going to do all the things that are going to you'll never come back from. Like you will never come back from that. >> Well, you know, and just on that front of like how it may not have come up to Trump is because it may have been that they just listened to the Israeli war plan which doesn't think in blockades. It thinks about destruction. The Israelis believed that they could knock the Islamic Republic off of its uh offkilter permanently with a strong powerful blow like they did with Hezbollah at the end of 2024. That seems to be the war plan they were sold on. The analysts on the other hand, everybody working in below the government has thought about every one of these things like you said since the 80s that doesn't knowing a lot of people some of my colleagues are former IC. Uh you write a big long report and only one person reads it and then throws it in the trash. Um, and that's just part of the way that our our internet intelligence community works is that sometimes your customer, i.e. your boss or politician simply doesn't pass on the information up the chain of command for various reasons. Um, but that being said, if you decide to go and cut off Iran's supply through Car Island and through the sea, you also not only supply you also incentivize the supply destruction, you also incentivize the Russians and the Chinese to get in more involved in Iran's adaptation strategy. and the geography still favors them on this front. Iran could uh ship across the Caspian into the Russian supplies and and uh they could also build railways and pipelines through Central Asia uh in order to get to China. These are expensive and slow processes. >> Yeah, I mean they take a while. Yeah, this this is not during a war, I imagine. not during a war, but the Russians and the Chinese can financially backs stop the uh the Iranian government during this emergency period in order to prevent it from collapsing, which is what they've done in other places. The US has done this in other places. They can do just enough of a financial backs stop to allow a combatant to fight the war. Then the war ends and then they come up with these same backups that mean that Hormuz and Car Island are less relevant for the Iranians afterwards. because it doesn't seem like just because you destroy Carve Island that the Basie stops showing up for work. The Basie will work and and and continue to control the country without a paycheck for a significant period of time. We don't know how long that would be, but with Syria, um we know that the regime wasn't paying its soldiers for months and even years, and they continued to fight the civil war because they were true believers. So, you don't break the regime overnight. Instead, you do harm the regime economically. you make their reconstruction path a lot more difficult. But you do incentivize their partners to be more active in helping them adapt to survive that because from Moscow and Beijing's perspective, the collapse of the Islamic Republic is not something they'd want to see um as a result of a supply destruction campaign by the US. >> Okay. Um All right. All right. I I mean, I could rat hole on the supply destruction thing because that that seems to be Iran's um >> I don't want to call it in in a hole because I I I I think it goes down as it does that. Yeah. >> Um but but that's that's its deterrent. We'll put it that way, right? That that's its quote unquote nuke nuclear deterrent here, right? It's it's equivalent to a nuclear deterrent, right? Hey, cross our red line and we just kill all our neighbors, right? Essentially. >> Yeah. Um, and I do think I mean, let's stick with this for a second. Let's say that happens, right? Iran goes scorched earth as best it can, right? Now, obviously, we'll be there trying to minimize their ability to do that. Um, its its partner, sorry, its neighbors aren't just going to take it sitting down. Presumably, they would they would get more kinetically involved. I don't know what they can bring, but they they'd get more kinetically involved. um what would the aftermath of of that look like? Yes, oil would go to some crazy number for a while, but if it ended up with Iran essentially being done, right? Because at that point too, we'd go in and presumably destroy every single piece of infrastructure they have, right? Um I mean, it's 20% of the world's oil. It's not a it's not 100%. I mean that hurts on the margin, but there's still 80% of oil left in the world. Those ex other net exporting countries would increase their production. You know, nations would would switch. Yes, there'd be rationing. There'd be all sorts of things in the near term. Trump would be very unpopular uh at home and wouldn't win the midterms and all that stuff. But again, the world would kind of go on, >> right? Um is that something America could live with? >> Well, yeah. Yeah, I mean the answer to a lot of these kind of doomsday scenarios is that the world continues no matter what. Uh and the world adapts and there are winners and losers in the course of that adaptation strategy. Um I think in the short term it's a shock right and it would be such a shock that we'd be so deep that you almost guarantee a global recession that would be deep and lasting. Global recessions tend to come with political unrest. So lots of governments would change around the world u both in the favor of populists and maybe non-pop populists as well. It would, you know, it would definitely be a boon for the Russians and their war effort because they would be one of the the the major suppliers of oil now. Uh, and the world would have to come to terms with that. And it might even feed into Ukraine losing the political will to fight because now they know the European partners need Russian gas and oil more than they need Ukraine and they're willing to partition Ukraine. So, you could see an end of that conflict because Europe and the US just lose the political will and so does Ukraine at the same time. reading the writing on the wall. You could also see lots of unrest in countries like Egypt or South Africa. You could see a lot of these energy importers going through such significant shocks that governments that aren't really delivering fall apart. Well, in the meantime, other countries like the US where we're run by a nationalist populace, you might see the similar kind of of counterback, you know, backlash to it that results in a more technocratic government taking power with our next election cycle and is more focused on adapting and fixing our energy crisis. um in a way that you know when Reagan came to power in 1980 it was in part to fix the energy crisis it was in part to fix the Iran crisis and fix inflation and so on and so forth in in what was in many ways a technocratic approach you know from the right technocratic but a technocratic approach so yes the world can survive this I think it's a question of how much adaptation a country is capable of whether or not its population is already incentivized to go in favor of that adaptation or whether or not there are such big inequities within that country that fuel unre unrest and create new conflicts where there weren't some before. Um, one of the more interesting outlays of the Ukraine war was the Yemen ceasefire and that was because the Houthis were hit so hard by the food and fuel shortage by Ukraine that they were willing to finally agree to a ceasefire with the Saudis because they simply couldn't they needed the humanitarian lifelines uh reopened. So there was a there was a a a deescalation that resulted from war in Europe. that would also happen is that other places where people are engaged in confrontations suddenly couldn't. Um I would see the US and China stepping back from the brink of confrontation in some ways because they would need each other more to cooperate in the aftermath of such a significant energy shock. All of a sudden you could see Chinese solar panels all over the United States because that's one of the offsets that we would need to take if there was a significant and lasting supply destruction. So that's not you know pros and cons, right? the idea of uh maybe the solar panels are are rigged with spyware and things like that. Um but nevertheless, those sort of force adaptations would which would push some adversaries together while driving others apart. >> Feel free to to not answer this question. Um but you have studied this region forever. You're an expert in it. Um the western view of Iran is largest state sponsor of terror in the world, right? Uh they're they're the regime the world would least like to see get a nuclear weapon because they think that it's the regime most likely to actually use it, right? That type of thing. It's it's been a fmentor of of chaos in its region. You know, whatever. You know the list. everything you just mentioned that could happen if if if Iran goes postal and attacks all you know tries to do the supply d energy supply destruction in its area and then we in the world just crush Iran. Is that a price worth paying to remove the Iranian threat permanently from the table? >> Um you would have to ask of course the American voter who has a significant say in this like at the end of the day we're having elections. we will have elections. Um that's how our strategy is formulated is partially through our political pillar of geopolitics. It filters up from the grassroots demands. America's interests in the region are energy and trade. That's it. Those are our core geopolitical imperatives that we care about are energy and trade. How do you go about assuring those? If Iran is an obstacle, you can do uh you know the the brute force approach that you know so many hackers and everything you just keep guessing the password until you guess it. You can do a brute force approach, but it's a significant investment in time, treasure, and blood. Is that worth the trade-off? Because the payoff may be 10 years down the line. Some will argue yes, because now you will have removed a significant American adversary, and you will have assured America's energy and trade supply lines in a massive way um for a long time to come. Others, on the other hand, will say it's not worth my political career. It's not worth, you know, my kids who are being sent to Iran to fight this war. Sure. It's not it's not worth me paying uh you know $9 a gallon or whatever it is for the next two or three years and me losing my job. Um because I don't think in 10-year timelines. I think in quarterly timelines, one-year timelines, etc. >> Sure. >> So, from a macro standpoint, my own opinion on how to approach the Iranians. Um since all we care about is energy and trade, I think the cheapest, most politically sustainable way to deal with the Iranians was containment. uh which is what we were doing even under Trump's maximum pressure campaign was still containment. We've ended that strategy. We've shifted to military pressure. We're now on with the Israelis on this mow the grass campaign where if we continue if we strike Iran every there and again the idea is that eventually it becomes so weak like Syria did that it falls apart on its own. I think there's a lot of problems with that strategy that mow the grass campaign. I don't know how the US can get out of being stuck in that dynamic having now ended containment because the Iranians won't accept containment again. They're going to use Hormuz as leverage over the global economy to break out of containment. So the US could go back to a cheaper approach which is containment light which means some sanctions relief allowing the Iranians to reconstruct themselves and essentially trying to find conventional deterrence to the Iranians so they don't think war is a great option to them in the future but having to accept that Iran is going to stay on the map and remain a significant middle power in the region. That would be another version of containment that I think is weaker than what we had, but might be the cheapest option going forward for both the American people and America's strategy globally at large. Okay. So, it's it's amazing to me on social media, right, the world I live in, um, how viferously people on either side are arguing that their side is winning. um you know militarily you know pro-American people are saying look this is like the best it's the most successful war ever right most successful military operation ever in terms of like you know damage inflicted on the enemy versus lives and and machinery lost um at this point um then there's a bunch of people on the Iran side saying you know you're kidding me Iran is totally the winner here right Um, do you have a strong opinion one way or the other? >> Uh, I think they're fighting two different wars which allows them to claim two different victory narratives. Um, the conventional war fought by the American Israelis is certainly a victory on the tactical front. You know, superiority on every level, not very many losses and a lot of targets struck. The Iranians asymmetric retaliation has been superior to what the Americans have been able to do. The American drone program is way far behind. uh people I talked to in the defense industry that are trying to come up with anti-drone tech are saying we've been out innovated by the Iranians in the way that they are able to strike us with such cheaper systems against our very expensive hardware. Um right now what it looks like to me is a stalemate because of that dynamic is that both sides have caused damage to one another and I think we will get a better sense of how much damage is lasting to either one in six months or 12 months. Then we'll really know whether or not Iran has been fatally damaged and and can't come back from it or if Trump is fatally damaged politically and can't achieve anything else as a result of this. Is this is this his Katrina or Afghanistan moment where his presidency is more or less finished afterwards? That's something that we'll be able to assess better in 12 months. But it looks like to me they fought two different wars to the net effect of neither side having significant leverage over the other. um because neither one has the capabilities or the willingness to impose that you know that that fullscale uh conventional victory over the over them that that would be necessary since after all Iran almost functions like a guerilla government you know an underground movement it it is very similar in that structure to the Vietkong in North Vietnam where it's very hard you can kill thousands of them but that doesn't break their political will it doesn't end the war and as long as they've got the supply lines of their foreigners they keep fighting and will keep fighting. So there's that dynamic. At the same time, Iran can't stop the US from operating throughout its country and you know carrying out special operations. Um and so those two dynamics are almost like the ceasefire. They're talking past each other in ter in terms of what does victory look like? Um and that's why I tend to think this is not the last Iran war. It will be the it's the fourth one since April 2024 when Israel and Iran finally attacked each other. Yeah, >> I think we're going to be seeing a series of these conflicts lasting throughout the rest of the Trump presidency. >> Okay. Um, and here's here's sort of well, here's just a follow-up question on that, which is, um, you could you can make the argument, well, look, yeah. All right, the US, forget about whatever tactical statistics you want to throw at me. Iran's still around, right? the the the regime. Yeah. Different guys, but but pretty much different, you know, different leaders, but pretty much the same regime in place and whatnot. So, you can say Iran is has um manage to continue to persist and the US doesn't really have an easy way to pull them out by the roots, right? >> Um the question I asked the other night on on X was just to the people who are saying, "Well, Iran is totally winning." It's like, can you name a country in the world that would swap places with Iran right now? It would say that looks so great. You're you're winning so badly. I would love to trade places with you be right. I mean, they have Yes, the regime is still persisting and they can still threaten and inflict damage, but their country has been carpet bombed. Their leadership has been, you know, eviscerated down several levels. Um, I don't if it all if the ceasefire leads to a peace agreement, I'm not sure Iran looks around and says, "Well, this was great. You know, we we we just got sent back, you know, infrastructure-wise several decades probably worth of rebuilding." >> Um, yeah, we we we can thumb our nose at the Great Satan, but, you know, we're we're going to have a lot of permanent injuries uh coming out of this. So, uh, is is it roughly equal or or, you know, I I just don't get the sense that Iran is emerging from this stronger? Yeah, they've got some bragging rights about this, but I it it's it's sort of like I don't know, you know, getting beaten up in a back alley and not dying and saying, "Hey, I kept those guys from killing me." But you're you're going to have some permanent injuries the rest of your life. I think for Iran the qu the final assessment will have to be written on how they do their reconstruction and how that how effective that is. Um they this was of course this is reason that they were not a first mover with with military aggression throughout the region. Even after Hezbollah was attacked even after Hassan Nasarallo was assassinated so many confrontations and provocations by the Israelis the Iranians were quite restrained in how they responded because they never wanted to be in this situation. This was the playbook for after Kmeni's assassination. Kameani was assassinated. They then put this worst case scenario to action because not doing anything would be worse than doing something. So in that sense certainly Iran never itself didn't want to be in this position but it happened anyway uh because of external uh actions by the Israelis and the Americans. They thought that they could find a way to continue to play enough diplomatic time to avoid this situation. That was a miscalculation with Trump. It turned out that he ran out of patience rather quickly. uh on the nuclear talks. So where does Iran go from here? If they can find a significant way to carry out reconstruction in addition to military rehabilitation with its great power partners, Iran can come out on the other side of this more radical and more hardline but potentially more secure. On the other hand, if the Iranians decide they're going to continue to focus on their sovereignty and kind of their third way foreign policy where they don't have too deep of alignments with the Russians and the Chinese, where they're still being very confrontational with the Americans for the sake of it, I think that is a losing prospect in the long term. But long term is a long time. I could be a very old man before I see an Iranian Gorbachoff finally emerge in the 2050s who said, "Remember that war in 2026? What a disaster that was." Um so that's where I think we need to see with that we need to see how they reconstruct and rehabilitate themselves after this. Um they are not suffering the kind of crushing military defeat that the Egyptians did in 1973 when the Israelis encircled their third army and it looked like Egypt was going to win until they didn't. That broke Egypt's political will to continue to fight those Israeli Arab wars and it forced Egypt's government to shift its alignment in the international system from the Soviets to the Americans. We haven't inflicted anything that decisive on the Iranians where they have no choice but to admit, hey, you won. You know, if we surrounded an Iranian army, took 100,000 prisoners, then the Iranians would have 100,000 hostages that they would have no choice but to deal with that reality. Assassinations, on the other hand, they can just put up with that in indefinitely. Um, and they can put up with the destruction of infrastructure from the air indefinitely because all they're going to say is we can rebuild it. The question is, can they actually do that? And if they can't, I think that they are going to be facing a Syrialike future where the system steadily decays until one day there's a protest movement and the Bas decide I'm not showing up for this one, >> right? I'm done. >> But I don't think that's going to happen this year and it may not happen next year or the year after. It may take a long time because as we've discussed before, Iran's a very big country and its ideology is still relatively young. We tend to think of ideologies as like about a hundred years is how long an ideology has before it runs out of its own generational >> about a human lifetime. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, they still got they're 50 years in. They can keep doing this probably for another 25 years before the younger people being born now and in the 2010s say, "I don't believe in the Islamic Republic. I don't believe in any of this nonsense. I'm besieged, but I do it for the paycheck. Paycheck stop coming. I'm not showing up either." Um, so we can end up there, but I just don't see it happening in the near term. >> Okay. And look, I'm not trying to push, you know, Team America here, but I'm just curious to get your reaction to this, which is just, you know, Iran is extremely vulnerable here in this, right? In other words, we can blow up Car Island any minute, right? We we we can take out its oil fields as well and and all its other infrastructure, you know, overnight if we really wanted to, right? So, they have that sort of damicles hanging over their heads. Now, they've got their dead man switch, but again, it's not a fun country after you've gotten to that point, right? And um you know, I don't know what Trump's thinking, but I think part of Trump's logic here is like, look, I'm just showing them they woke the big dog up and I came in and I've smacked them down, hurt him pretty hard. They're still around, but do you want to go through that again? >> You know, to mow the lawn kind of in your language, right? But but I mean, is there a chance here that Iran is just saying like, you know what, there's got to be a better strategy than this? >> I mean, certainly there is. And the better strategy they're hoping for is informal control of Hormuz. That that's what they seem to be aiming for. And we'll see if they can get some sort of informal control of Hormuz and some sort of sanctions relief because that's part of the reconstruction strategy if they can get that because, you know, can Trump start this kind of war every six months? I mean, from a legal standpoint, it looks like he can. Congress isn't going to stop him uh anytime soon. >> From an electoral standpoint, though, who knows? >> So, but can he keep doing it without evaporating his political capital? I don't think so. I think is I think his his presidency has been wounded by this policy choice in a way that it won't come back from. Is it a fatal wound? We'll see. Um but that that's something that the Iranians are looking at and they have always calculated we can fight a long war and a long war for us could be 10 to 20 years like the Taliban and the Americans can only fight it quarter to quarter and you know election cycle to election cycle. That's always factored into their thinking. So they're the Iranians are looking at this toward the November midterms towards 2028. if it has to go until that point that's something that they're braced for. On the other for Trump on the other hand, you know, he has to think in shorter timelines because of the nature of our political system. Um, and then that, you know, that shifts the Iranian imperatives of again the reconstruction thing is something they have to confront when the war is firmly over. But as long as there's a war emergency, it makes it easier to control the population, easier to prevent a protest movement that would be fatal. And it keeps the elites, especially the security elites, united because it's an external aggressor. >> Okay. Um, I want to get to some positive stuff in just a second, but um, so when when I'm going to preface this by saying, and I know I'm going to get a bunch of blowback in the comments here, um, but when Trump uh, addressed the nation last week, um, I I wrote after that, I think it was a missed opportunity because what I thought one of the the things the president should have done most was talk to the uncertain American voter who is uncomfortable with the war and doesn't understand why America felt it had to take action on February 28th, right? And and you know, you may remember a couple weeks ago there was a bunch of talk about, well, there was an imminent threat, right? But I think a lot of Americans are sort of like, wait a minute, like Iran's been close to getting a nuke for a while. We've been here we've been hearing that for years and years. like like what what was it that you know was essential for us to have to take action then right and some people have said well because Israel was going to act and this is Israel setting the tune and America being Israel's lap dog and all that stuff right >> so I felt that that Trump really just needed to talk to those should have talked to those people and just said hey look this is why I had to go right and he didn't um what was interesting is Marco Rubio sent out a like a two-minute video clip around the same time making that case. I thought it was actually uh exactly what Trump should have said. And look, I'm not saying folks, you have to agree with what Rubio said, but at least it was a cogent, hey, this is why it got to an imminent state. And if I if I took the right message away from Rubio's video, Ryan, it was that Iran was sort of hyperacelerating its ballistics uh capabilities, basically a porcupine strategy. We wanted to become so ballistically um uh strong uh that um we could then develop our nuclear uh bomb program to the point where we would have enough you could basically get a bomb and nobody could could stop us from doing that because we had so many ballistics, so many drones. We were basically going to become too hard to assail, too painful to assail. and that the US said, "Look, our red line's always been Iran can't have a bomb, and so we've got to step in now and degrade their ballistics capabilities, not just their their inventory of ballistics, but their ability to to manufacture more. Um, we we got to stop that now because it's about to cross the event horizon where we're not going to be able to easily stop that in the future." And then obviously we got to we got to >> once that's done, we got to figure out, you know, how to make sure they don't enrich uranium again. Um, what is your reaction to that? Is is that what your intelligence has been telling you? Was that the reason that we needed to the rationale for why the US needed to act or is that just political theater to try to give some justification to this? >> So, quickly, three answers on that. The first is that yes, the intelligence suggests that the Iranians were rapidly rebuilding their missiles and drones after the June 2025 war and that they were moving to reconstitute their nuclear program at a pace that was faster than what the Americans and the Israelis believed after that war. Remember, Trump said it was obliterated. The intelligence community never believed that. They believed it had been set back. That was his language for political purposes. The Israelis particularly were saying that they're they're doing this a lot faster than we thought they could. So essentially it was the mowing the grass strategy and the Israelis and parts of the IC and the US were were assessing that the grass was growing back much faster than they had expected. >> Okay. So so there was a legit critical threshold that concerned >> it was it was critical in the sense that what they were hoping is that the Iranians would be so weakened after June 2025 that they would offer concessions through the diplomatic front. Of course the Israelis wanted for a different purpose. They believed that they had degraded them enough to set them up for regime change uh in the future. So it's two different two different tracks. The Americans wanted to weaken their resolve. The Israelis wanted to weaken their capabilities to survive. Both of them were assessing that the capabilities were regenerating where neither of those goals were violians wouldn't quickly come back from and that Iran would be incapable of closing Hormuz because they we would destroy so much in the first wave. at least. Again, that's what we're seeing from the initial reporting out of the New York Times uh of all of these leaks out of the administration. So, they were told it'd be an easy war. And then the third part is he thought it be could be as fast as Maduro, that he wouldn't even need to sell to the public. He would just do it. He would be successful. On the other side of it, he'd claim victory after four or five days. Um, and that he'd be able to walk away with that big, you know, victory sigil of saying, "I didn't have to ask your permission. I'm just >> Do you think that's true? Because that just sounds if it was true, it sounds so incredibly naive. >> Dural said was insane to me when I woke up that morning and saw that we had abducted a sovereign leader of another country and done it, you know, in such a short time. I I thought there's no way somebody green lit this, but they did. >> To totally agree, but but comparing Venezuela and Iran from a complexity standpoint is you'd have to be an idiot to to >> that one would go just like the other. They they thought the Israelis were saying and the Americans seem to believe at least the one the Americans that mattered, the ones the decision makers believed they could treat Iran like Israel did Hezbollah at the end of 2024 with capstone assassination campaigns, strikes on targets at scale to the point where the Iranians are so knocked off kilter that their retaliation would be mild or weak or limited uh and that their political will to resist would be significantly weakened as well. Remember, Trump says over and over again, we've had regime change. Um, what he means by that is he's killed all the initial right leadership and replaced them with people who are arguably more hardline than their than the uh their predecessors. But that that was believed, the assumptions were believed that if they did this at such a senior level, with such precision, with such suddenness, with no warning, that it would shock the Iranians into concessions and then prevent the Iranians from being able to rebuild themselves because of how hard they would hit them. The problem was, and I think we talked about this before, Iran's a middle power. It's too big to do this in a weekend. America hasn't fought a country of this size since the Chinese in Korea. There's no tradition of what this means. A World War II planner would have looked at this campaign and said, "You're going to need half a million troops. You're going to need X, Y, and Z. You're going to need to ration the country for six months because of the scale of what you're asking." But we're so used to fighting the CNN surgical wars that the war planners overlooked that because they knew the political will for that kind of struggle was simply not there. >> Okay. All right. I'm going to start wrapping up real quick. Um just from your assessment. So let's say just war stops today. How set back is Iran in your opinion? I think that they, you know, I'll go off of Israeli assessments that might still be a little bit too optimistic, but they're saying about half of Iran's ballistic missiles are still intact. It's probably a bit higher than that. Their drone program is still intact. Their political system is still intact. A lot of damage has been done to their infrastructure that will be hard to rebuild. Uh, you know, especially on the civilian front, I don't know how long that will necessarily take for them to get that back up uh uh up and running. But I think that you'll have two narratives. On the civilian front, it's worse for the Iranians. Their civilian economy is going to look at the next six to 12 months as a very tough time period as they try to adapt to this. On the military front, I think that the system will choose to produce more guns than butter the way that we see countries like North Korea do uh in order to harden and fortify a military arm that has largely been able to weather the worst that has been thrown at it so far. So, I think you'll have two narratives and it's it's a question of whether or not the security forces can adapt into a North Korea style posture where the country is run for the sake of the armed forces or if they're going to get overwhelmed because Iran is a complex nation, lots of different ethnicities, more poorest borders, not necessarily the same kind of security support from its great power partners. Um, if it gets overwhelmed by this reconstruction process. So I Iran will remain dangerous and Iran will be remain capable of causing more harm and disruptions in case of more escalations into the near future. Whether or not the political economy cracks in half and whether or not we start to see that that fatal weakening, I think that's to remains to be seen. But the elements of it are definitely going to be there in the aftermath of this war. >> Okay. Um but if you had to to to guess um so even if they go the guns route, right? Um, and I know there's a lot we don't know for sure. Um, currently the just listened this morning to the Department of War update. You know, they're basically saying, "Look, we've we've destroyed the vast majority of their militaryindustrial infrastructure, right? So, their ability to to rebuild this stuff, it's it's they're going to have to rebuild all those factories first before they can start rebuilding the drones and the missiles and everything like that. um you know all this stuff will presumably take time. Um, and I guess my question to you is if if if Iran was a 10 in terms of its ability to um, you know, be proactive about things uh, going forward, what number would you give them right now given that there's going to be at least some period of time where they're just going to have to be devoting their energies and and their revenues to just rebuilding what they what they used to have before. in terms of, you know, we're kind of rating at 0 to 10 in terms of their regenerative abilities. I would give the posturing probably uh a range of six to eight and I would give it a higher end on the eight scale if they integrate more with the Russians and the Chinese. And remember, China's got tons of steel and concrete that they used to do dumping for, they can they can provide the reconstruction materials through the Caspian. Uh if if the if Hormuz remains closed, uh to to help Iran rebuild quickly. Um, also the Iranians need a version of Albert Shar from from World War II with Germany. Remember the Germans under the Allied air bombardment. They were producing more weapons uh under the Allied air bombardment in 1944 than they were only a couple of years before because they had a masterindustrial designer who understood how to build such a resilient system. It was only when they lost territory that their arms production industry actually collapsed. Iran can go in that direction if they have the kind of leaders with that sort of vision and those foreign connections to supply them with the materials that they need. Six is the Iranians decide they still want to be a sovereign Islamic republic and that means not having anything to do with the godless communists in China or the the ultra the the orthodox in Russia. uh and they decide that they want to maintain a distance from these key strategic partners who will of course have asks of them and and will they so surrender their sovereignty. Um if they go in that direction, they're more in the direction of Syria where Syria at the end of the day wasn't willing to let the Russians colonize it. It wasn't letting willing to let the Iranians colonize it even if though those probably were the best ways for the Assad government to survive in the long run. They wanted some level of sovereignty that limited the amount of reconstruction and and security arrangements that those key partners could provide uh for Syria. So, if they go on that road, I think that they're they're more in that direction of that lower end of of reconstruction, re rehabilitation. And I don't know where they'll go right now because I don't know if the Iranians know where they'll go right now. Um because the dust and the burn and the fires are are still burning. >> Okay. So, a big wild card here is going to be what happens with the Iranian people. and what they choose to do. And from our previous discussions, Ryan, you've explained several times that it's uh the probability of a populist uprising in Iran is is challenged and it's probably lower than a lot of Westerners imagine because it's a very fractured country in terms of um its populace and its ethnicities and uh what people want. And it's not like there's just an opposition leader waiting in the wings that the entire country would could rally behind. Um probably your best case scenario is is you would have different factions putting forth their >> their recommended leaders and there would have to be a period of time of the country figuring out well which one are we going to rally behind and obviously the very oppressive current regime isn't going to allow that that type of coordination to happen. Um, so I I guess this is just me asking you, is there is there anything new on the potential for the Iranian people to actually have a voice in this process? >> I think where you could see that gain salience is in the reconstruction process where there's a long of enough of a lull that splits emerge between the pragmatists and the hardliners. You know, uh, Masoud Peskian, the the Iranian president, one of his big stickticks was tan's about to run out of water. We need to fix this. We need to we need to make sure that we can actually provide basic uh >> and what's happening with that >> uh they're I mean at this point the >> the war can't be helping that can it? >> Absolutely. It's a big part of the reconstruction problem is is that they had pre-existing issues before the war that are worse afterwards. That debate can't take place in a national security emergency. If the national security emergency ends and it ends in a permanent way and they no longer have the narrative to turn themselves into the Middle Eastern North Korea, then pragmatists when within the system can say we have to come up with a better strategy than confrontation with the West in an open-ended sense to make sure we have water in Tyrron and we have to rebuild these factories and stuff like this. Um, and you know, remember if if Iran does align itself with Russia and China more, that doesn't mean that they're necessarily more confrontational with the West. It means that they're more subordinate to Chinese and Iran and and and Russian interests. So their great Satan narrative gets replaced with the, you know, where the BRICS alliance narrative and whatever our united front is is is what our new interests are. So um that is where I think that there could be the potential for popular change and reform. What I think we need to wait for is that day where the buses are not getting their paychecks and they care about not getting their paychecks. You know, after all, our TSA agents weren't getting their paychecks for a while. A lot of them were quitting. Um, others were sticking with the with it, believing that this would be temporary. Um, you know, but there's a lot of, you know, American soldiers, how long would they go without a paycheck if they thought it was only temporary? I think it would be a long time before they finally gave up on on national security. So, I think we need to see that happen where they can no longer provide the security forces with that economic lifeline to prevent them from like sliding into poverty. And it needs to be sustained and it needs to be to a point where these individuals are saying like Syri like Assad's fighters said, "Why am I doing this? They can't get me gas. They can't get me air conditioning. I've been doing this for 10 years. I'm tired. Um the rebels are coming. Good luck." You know, I hope they hear me. >> Um so I think that's what we still have to wait for. And I think that that's there will be another protest movement in Iran. It's guaranteed. It's part of the Iranian historical cycle. At what point do the security forces not shoot into the crowd? That will remain to be seen, but it will definitely happen. It will be much more likely to happen if we have a botched reconstruction scenario uh on the aftermath of this war. >> Okay. And just given your knowledge of the regime, what odds do you give them of of sticking the landing on the reconstruction versus botching it? >> Uh I would give them in in the direction of that six or seven, I would say. Uh and potentially on the lower end, >> even though they can't get water to their people already. >> Yeah. I mean that and that's that's where the that's where that lower end of of of because these regimes can hold on for a long time in spite of the lack of basic services. So can they stick the landing the region suggests that Saddam couldn't do it. Assad couldn't do it. Even uh Jose Mubarak couldn't really do it in Egypt with pro-American leanings. At a certain point people want butter over guns particularly in the Middle East. This is just not a conformist uh it's there's a reason communism never really took hold in the Muslim world. It's just Islam creates social structures that just don't go along with totalitarianism all that well. So if they go in that direction of totalitarianism and military first stuff, there's probably a lifpan to it that's within our lifetimes. It's just hard to tell what the trigger will necessarily. >> We just might be old men as you were saying. Yeah. >> Exactly. The other danger to that is that the Americans and the Israelis decide to intervene in the course of another protest movement and instead of aiding the protesters, now you have a national security emergency and they crush the protesters. um and and the protest movement isn't able to take take hold of the country. >> Okay. Uh one thing we didn't talk about and I don't we're gonna have time to talk about today was um President Trump actually admitted that during the protests uh the US had sent um guns to into Iran to the Kurds. Um but apparently at least per Trump that didn't get in the hands of the protesters. Um but different story for a different day. But how much of Iran's 90 million people, and there's some percentage there that are pro the regime, but I think from our past breakdown, they're a minority. Um, how many are are looking around at what's going on there and thinking, okay, we can't be winning here. like you know there's a rally around the flag effect when your country is uh attacked and I'm sure there's some of that going on while the bombs are dropping but how many are just looking around being like we can't be winning here if I'm seeing all these buildings getting taken out around me every night here in Tan um and just maybe they they already weren't you know fans of the regime so losing faith might be the wrong word but maybe maybe just getting emboldened or just getting to a a point of look, I got nothing else to lose at this point? Like h has has the bombardment of of the country made the populace any more likely to act against the regime? >> Um I don't think so in the near term. No. uh what you the what life is like in an authoritarian country and you know having lived in the Emirates and Qatar uh those are also authoritarian countries. What life is like politically is that politics basically doesn't exist. Is that you're not supposed to talk about it. You're not supposed to have an opinion of it. You are a bystander. You're a bystander to its foreign policies. You're a bystander to its crackdowns. If it does something you don't like, you stay quiet about it. That's how most Iranians are approaching this because that's how they've been socialized for many of their for their entire lives is that if they are allowed to have a political opinion, it's on very specific issues like Palestine or on the limited presidential elections, things like that they are allowed to have an opinion on. So most of them are just >> what your opinion will give it to you. Yeah, I got it. >> Yeah. So the so they most folks and I've seen a lot of what few things can come out of the country because remember the internet is shut down. the regime is controlling information. Um, not everybody is seeing bombardments all the time. You know, even in a big city like Tyrron, which is millions of people, not everybody's constantly seeing these bombardments. Um, and and so there's a way to compartmentalize this and say it's not as bad as it might seem. There's also a way to say it's not my problem. I'm not a political person. I don't I want to just go to my job. I want to go to the cafe and have coffee, etc. Um, and there's a lot of other people who are like, the believers are still dangerous. They know where I live. The Israelis don't. um if I upset the believers, they're going to come from my job, my family, my kids, etc. Um and that's how authoritarian systems function is that climate of fear and kind of stifling of opinion that allows them to carry on day-to-day. They're fatal in that at one point an event can happen that catalyzes the end of that climate of fear and then everybody comes out and overwhelms the system. It's always hard to tell what that catalyst of ending that climate of fear is going to be. The Arab Spring was a guy setting himself on fire in Tunisia and that spread across the whole region. That was very hard to predict that would happen. But the ground elements of that descent were predictable before it happened. And we know those ground elements of descent are going to be predictably uh in effect in Iran afterwards. We just don't know if the threshold is going to be high enough for a bad enough standard of living to animate people to a level to overthrow a government that has been preparing for its overthrow ever since it overthrew the last one. >> Okay. All right. Um well obviously um whatever happens we'll wish the best for the people of Iran themselves uh separate from the regime. Okay. So as we end here um let's talk about best case scenario. What should we be rooting for Ryan? >> Uh a rapid normalization of Hormuz and a rapid normalization of security conditions in the region. I think uh uh the normalization of Hormuz I think is is somewhat on the table in the next month or two. It probably requires big American concessions to the Iranians, but Iran wants to get its energy out as well. It does want to start to rebuild its relations with its Gulf Arab neighbors, which is served by normalizing Iran uh hormuz. So, I think that's one thing to root for. And the other is the rooting for normalization of security conditions. Essentially, the message being sent to the Israelis and to the hawks in the United States that they can't do a mow the grass campaign against Iran that pulls us into cycles over and over again. Um, and then kind of cobbling together what I was talking about before that that u not great but it, you know, not terrible uh containment uh strategy against the Iranians until again an Iranian Gorbachoff emerges sometime in the future. >> Okay. Um, well, let's hope for all those things, folks. So, Ryan, let's assume that all happens, right? Is the world a safer place or less safe place than it was pre the war? uh if the best case scenario happens and we end up with an Iranian Gorbachoff and and Iran >> Okay. Yeah. Yeah. >> Um if we end up with a containment, there's a lot of implications that we have to pull apart here because China's looking at this war with its drone and missile arsenal and thinking about Taiwan. The Russians of course are looking at whether or not the southern flank in the Persian Gulf is a good way to distract the Europeans and the Americans from what it cares about in Eastern Europe. Um and of course the American public itself is asking the question of why do we globally police anything? Uh shouldn't we just be bothering with only within our borders? Um so the answer of whether or not the world is safer, I don't think the world will ever be at that point where you have 1990s style safety. I think you are entering a multipolar environment in which conflict and chaos will be compartmentalized to specific parts of the world and you'll just have to get better at reading the map and and seeing that the way that you know Thailand and Cambodia are fighting this week now it's you know Peru and Bolivia the next you know it's going to be these conflicts that you no longer thought were were possible on the map but are becoming normalized through this process and I've seen it described as not a world war but a world at war as we shift over to an environment where there's not a great superpower balancer that puts out all the fires. I think more fires will happen, but they won't be a global fire and they'll require adjustments and adaptation as they break out from time to time. >> Okay. Um, last question on this. So again, let's say we get everything we you you know, you you you say we should hope for in the near term here, right? So you know, peace deal struck under the best terms we can hope for. In your opinion, America versus the rest of the world is America looked to as the country that did the right thing and showed that it's got incredibly unmatched military might and um I want America is my buddy. Um or is it more like uh America is a bully. Uh it it broke a lot of its previous alliances. You know, is America stronger strengthened or weakened by this? If if we get the peace terms that you would most like to see, >> uh if we got the best case scenario, I think that you would end up with with a world that would say America's a destabilizing risktaker, still willing to to uh to take these sorts of actions that may have dire consequences in the short term, but in the long term things pan out. That might be the conclusion that countries come away with. Uh especially if Iran and the GCC can ever rehabilitate their ties. the GCC is in the midst of a of a massive debate as to whether or not America is reliable or not uh over this war. But if things end up with the Islamic Republic, you know, no longer existing, then they'll be able to say that was dangerous, but that was worth it in the end. On the other hand, I think the more realistic thing is two things will be true. Is that America is still a paramount military power that doesn't have the political will to see through its campaigns. And I think that's the most likely thing that a lot of of of countries are going to observe from this war, including the Chinese, the Russians, our GCC partners, the Israelis, etc. And they'll adapt to that. And and you know, for China, that might say we can't go a full ground invasion against Taiwan. Because if we do, the Americans are going to stop us. We just saw what they could do against similar systems in Iran. On the other hand, what if we just find a way to crash their stock market routinely through a blockade of Taiwan? That might make them actually give up on the island. So they're going to adjust their strategies um in in reaction to that perception that America's political will is not there, but our military and technological capabilities are. >> Okay. Yeah. Which which you know sounds like it may make us more feared in certain ways um but also embolden some others too that hey there there there's vulnerable parts of its underbelly. But what you just described there makes me think that allies would be, you know, more nervous of us coming out of this than before, >> especially for long conflicts. I I think that NATO will be able to say if the Russians ever send bombers into Poland, the Americans will shoot them, almost all of them down and beat the Russian air force. And as long as it's a it's a month-long campaign, the Americans will be there for us and and really, you know, protect our skies. If the Russians can somehow do that over two years, the Americans don't have the the the political will for it, they will eventually cut a deal that will undermine our sovereignty um because their system just can't handle those sorts of World War II style uh lifestyle sacrifices that would be necessary for such a conflict. Um so I think it'll be two different conclusions is like get the Americans involved in short conflicts. Don't let them get bogged down in long ones. They can't do that anymore. Um buy their hardware, but don't trust them to necessarily make decisions that are always in your best interest. Um, and don't always look at them as a stabilizing force. They will be erratic. They will be experimental. They will be risktakers. And sometimes that will pan out and sometimes it won't. >> Okay. All right. Well, look, Ryan, um, whenever you're on, I I always say um I hope it's a while before we have you on again because that means hopefully things are going better in the world. Um, can't thank you enough for this. I wanted to share some comments here. Um, this one person says, "Absolutely brilliant stuff. best insight into the various outcomes and scenarios I've seen from anyone. Um I I I I very much appreciate that feedback and again that's 1% me is the guy just tossing the pitches and 99% Ryan is the guy who's actually swinging the bat. Um but thank you Ryan and you know I think the the the point that I just want to underscore here is you know a lot of people are feeling that like look I don't get kind of this deep nuance discussion in the regular media. It's either something that is, you know, highly biased that is trying to play to one part of the hyperpolarized factions that are out there or it's TV and, you know, not only is there bias there, but it's just sound bites, right? And and you really help us dig deeply into the weeds and see this from from a whole variety of different perspectives, Ryan. And I really appreciate um your your ability to do that. There was one or two other ones I wanted to pull up here. Um this one here, same deal. Definitely worthwhile discussion irrespective of your point of view. You know, again, what we're trying to do here, folks, is is not come at this from any particular partisan or biased standpoint. Um we're just trying to see it as completely as as we can around all the different perspectives. And again, Ryan, you've been a fantastic source for that. So, thank you. >> Well, I I appreciate it. Again, this is great to do this kind of external facing stuff. Um, I'm now starting to work on a bit of a manuscript about the geopolitical uh net assessment of the Middle East to just see if I can get uh a little bit more of that narrative out there because I think people still fall into the the good guys versus bad guys stuff rather than interests versus compulsions versus constraints. Um, and hopefully I can add to the discourse on that on a more substantial level. >> Oh wow. Well, yeah, if if and when that manuscript is an actual publication, let us know. You come back on here. I'm sure we got a bunch of people. >> We'll see how it goes. You know, these things are This is not easy, but I'll let you know. >> All right. Well, folks, couple quick things as we end up here. Um, please let Ryan know how much you appreciate him coming on and doing all this for us. Uh, both in the the live chat if you're watching live in the comment section below if you're watching the comments. Um, definitely hit the like button if you haven't already. Um, and if you would like to see us do more of this, not just in the specific case of Iran, uh, but in other u key developments in the world, like we had Mario Braa, um, who is one of Ryan's colleagues there, come on and talk with us about both Venezuela and Cuba. If you'd like to see more of these type of special reports around breaking developments in the world, um, hit the subscribe button as well as that little bell icon right next to it. And we will do more of these in the future. Ryan, for folks that would like to follow you and your work in between now and your next appearance on this channel, where should they go? >> Um, I'm I'm pretty active on X these days. That's been very useful for this conflict. >> Yeah, I'm glad you become more active there, by the way. I really enjoy following you. >> The the for you function isn't as bad as people said, so I'm actually getting the content that I want. Uh, and I'll still post some long forms on LinkedIn. And of course, our website, uh, rainnetwork.com is where our our substantial analysis is. That's where our forecasts that we just published for Q2 have have just come out that includes scenarios for uh the Iran conflict as well as Israel's strategy going forward. Uh the GCC's adaptation strategies. Um so that's where the bulk of my work is is always going to be at the red network.com. >> All right. Fantastic. And you know, Ryan, I'm going to totally um lie to you. Uh I I was going to wrap it up, but I realized there's a key question I had didn't ask you that unfairly just give us your 60-cond version of this. um oil prices. So, we've seen oil prices come down pretty dramatically given the news of last night's ceasefire. Um what do you think is the most likely trajectory for oil prices from here? >> It it looks like there's >> Can't believe I didn't ask you that earlier. Sorry. >> Yeah, of course. Uh, and I'm not an oil analyst in and of myself in and of itself, so I I can't tell you about the transactions, the very nuanced ways that these prices are set, but broadly speaking, it does look like there's still some more slack, at least in the United States, for more supply destruction before the oil market panics. Um, I tend to think that it's a bit on the enabling side of of the way that the market is treating these prices of assuming that things are are they really want to grasp onto the idea that this is a short war. And I don't think that that's a safe assumption to make at this point. Like I said, I think the thing that's going to kick off a panic of sorts is in a major industrialized nation taking energy saving measures that impact its GDP outlook. And and I don't know if that's necessarily going to happen, but at the end of April is when some organizations like JP Morgan have said Japan, South Korea, Europe, they're going to have to start doing some version of this. Um, and if that happens, that's where I think our markets will finally say now it's serious. Now supply destruction has taken place. I can no longer plan for December for oil prices to be back at $70 uh for WTI. >> Okay. All right. I'm sorry I didn't give you a chance to answer that more fully earlier on. And if things continue to get bumpy from here, we'll dig into it the next time you're on. >> Of course. Of course. Um yeah, again, it's always great to join you, Adam. Your audience is fantastic. So, it's always a a great discussion. >> All right. Well, thank you, my friend. All right. And everybody else, thanks so much for watching.