Future Outlook for the Conflict

Hi everybody We're in the middle of an exchange of fire between Israel and Iran, we're recording just a few hours After that happened, President Trump is pushing on the Israelis to tamp down on the Iranians to tamp down.'s probably disrupting the negotiations between the U. S. and Iran And a lot of people have been asking what it all means. and it's very hard to tell what Trump wants and what Trump thinks is happening and what he plans And the reason Sart to tell is that he has done a great many feintts.'s pretended to want to negotiate a peace and then actually started the airstrikes. when he when he's declaring most loudly that the airstrikes will escalate That's often when we suddenly see the airirstrikes stopping and negotiations beginning Trump is a great believer in saying the thing that will help serve his interests rather than telling the truth. Now, this is a great thing for a leader facing an enemy. You don't want the enemy to know exactly what you're thinking, when you'll cave, when you'll demand, when you're willing to you know see things through to the end. It's a basic question of negotiations and war is a kind of politics, a kind of negotiations And in that sense, know, I don't mind that it's hard to tell what Trump is doing. That's probably a very useful thing for America writ large, that its administration is a little bit unpredictable, not clear always where its lines are. In this particular case, Trump appears that his politics really, his political position and the Republican Party generally, appear to really want the war to end. And if that's true, then maybe the negotiations with Iran are exactly what they look like. There's no new round of airstrikes coming. Now I could say that in two hours later, there's a new round of airirstrikes coming. We've seen a few leaks, for example, from the administration to the New York Times. We've seen that JD Vance and his people in the administration reportedly, allegedly, apparently, this is not something I know from the inside, don't like the war. Look for ways to publicly distance themselves from the war. Look for ways to dump what they perceive or what partart of the Republican Party perceives as failure of the war onto Israel. Look to blame Israel for tricking the U. S into entering the war. We've seen New York Times headlines about Israelis espionage on America alleged accccording to a report from the Pentagon that the New York Times apparently itself hadn't seen, but this is something leaked from the unnamed administration officials to suggest that the Israelis are not actually allies of America, close to America, friends with America. It looks like Enough people around Trump that the war wasn't wise isn't going well and won't end well for Republicans politically, that he might actually be. theseese are signals that suggest intent and suggest a perception of the war that it's not positive. And therefore, he's probably trying to get out of it. He said to Israel, donon't bomb Dah even if Hezbollah know escalates, Hezbollah escalated, Netanyah bombed Dahya, then Iran launched a missile strikes on Israel trying to create that new status quo. And Israel's response was to bomb Iran. And that was an Israeli attempt to say, noope that's not the status quo, Status quo is over here. You know, you strike us. you will be hit on Iranian soil and it'll be a petrochemical planant And so all of this maneuvering, Trump is now angry and telling both sides to stop All of that is to say, it looks like Trump really does want to tamp things down. Now it's very useful for Trump politically for this to be Israel's fault And so it's not at all impossible to imagine that these two very wily politicians Netanyahu and Trump creating manufacturing crises between them as a gift to each other. A cris with Trump, a fallout with Trump hurts Netanyahu going into an election that Netanyahu is not winning in the polls at the moment. but it helps Trump to have that distance appear when he needs it to appear. And so it's possible this is a gift in Netzanyahu in the exchange because Trump can do real damage if he chooses to to stop the Israelis from airirstrikes on their own Its possible that Trump is sanct and saying, you, I'm going yell at you publicly. Do what you need to do. Don't do too much. Don't actually drag me in again. price you're going to pay is that you and I will look like a rupture because I need that And it's in Yell said sure That's entirely possible That's what I think is happening. I can't prove it at all. So I'm just saying it could also just be exactly what it looks like But that's what I suspect is happening because Trump as we've seen in the past has threatened real threats that really brought the Israelis to heal. and He's not doing that now. The more important thing to know is that whatever Trump's politics are, you know political needs are, they probably end in the midterms. If the House switches to Democrats, which appears likely he'll have budget problems with, you know, maintaining another war in Iran, etcetera. But That's not immediate You know, the Iranians will provide the excuse. America and Iran have exchanged fire constantly over the course of the negotiations for the ceasefire because Iran keeps testing its limits in the strait of her moves And the Israelis of Hezbllh exchang fire constantly in the ceasefire in Leanon because Iran told Heezebllah to And so these are ceasefires where they're still shooting in every front But the shooting is limited. It's shooting to an inappropriate amount, so to speak. which is how the sides think about it. It sounds odd to say that, but that's actually how all the different sides in the Middle East think about it. I don't know if Trump is genuinely angry at Nitsanyo or wants needs to look like he's angry at Nitsanyyu. I don't know if the negotiations are going to fail. The Iranians appear to believe they have Trump over a barrel It could mean that they have Trump over a barrel. It could also mean that because there are Mukawama ideologues. They can only ever behave as if they have Trump over a bow. They can't actually negotiate intelligently and pull back. We know that the people in charge of Iran at the moment art serious extremists in the context of the Iranian regime. If for Israel, that's a good thing I know that sounds odd again Israel has to be able to strike twenty years. a regime actively working to eliminate it, that has never not been actively working to eliminate it And so for Israel, if the regime is led by Zarif, or all these, you know, very moderate names that people became familiar with because diplomats fell in love with them It's still going to be working to destroy Israel, but it'll be harder to make that case because these people will be saying the right things. the propagandistic The capacity of a dictatorship is much greater than the propaganda capacity of a democracy, always. It doesn't matter what Trump wants, half the White House leaks the other thing. There's factions within. any government, all of that is to say, The fact that Iran talks a good game doesn't mean it isn't internally deeply divided. totally extremist and out to eliminate Israel. So the Israelis need the Iraniis to look like what they are and the people trying to avoid the fact that Iran really will drive forever wars in the Middle East until this regime falls want it to look like what it pretends to be under people like Zareif. So that's That's basically where things stand right now the negotiations are probably going to fail. and if they're not going to fail then it'll probably be a bad deal for America because that's the only thing the Iranians can sign on to In some ways, the details are very important for what's in the deal. Getting that highly riched uranium out would be Astonishingly important. I mean, amazingly good thing for the world. But in other ways, it's you know there are all these claims by intelligence services and governments and Trump himself that is buried so deep they can't get it out. That's obviously always ever going to be a question of time. But in other ways, it doesn't matter so much. Their capacity to enrich uranium has been depleted so greatly just because The centrifuges at any scale, the centrifuges are destroyed and the capacity to build centrifuges, a lot of has been destroyed and some of the industrial base required to build those centrifuges, steel mills and whatnot destroyed and the Israelis are willing to destroy more going forward. And so we have to assume the Iranians are hiding installations. They've been hiding installations the whole time. Almost every major installation that the world knows about today, the Iranians were hiding until some intelligence agency off in the Mossad, but not only discovers it. And at the end of the day, what's in the deal won't matter because the Irani w't and what hover over the deal. and the Iranians agree to something and if they brereak the agreement, what's the threat, right? All options are on the table, Obama famously said, and nobody believed him. Not the Israelis, not the Iranians, not anybody in Obama's own circle the Obama administration was going to bomb Iran if it violated some deal. So they'll eventually violate it. There's nothing to stop them. And then it has the capacity has to be reduced. The Israelis don't really care what's in the deal. They care what America will be paying for the deal. How much money will be released for the IRGC to go back on the warpath? The Israelis are big fans of as many restrictions as humanly possible But it doesn't ultimately matter. It's about denying them capabilities. They will never not cheat. they will never not lie. they will never not try to build nukes, they will never change from being a Mkawama ideology, they will never pivot. away from forever war and regional aggression and a takeover and proxies and missiles to actually building out the Iranian economy. Iran today could be as wealthy as Saudi Arabia and as clever technologically and innovative technologically as Israel. Nothing prevents that except this regime. And this regime will never build that. I think that the important thing is to take a step back. Don't watch the details. Many of Iran's nuclear capabilities, missile capabilities have been set back dramatically President Trump at the very least has bought a great deal of time for a future administration on questions like its nuclear program. When the imagined goal is regime change, people who follow our podcast know that That was not going to be an easy and obvious goal. They don't fall because of bombs. You can't bomb this regime out of existence. That's something we talked about a great length days before the February War even even began. But if you do set that standard and don't meet it, then even if you've accomplished a tremendous amount, It looks like failure There is a sense because of high gas prices and the looming midterms and all of that in the United States that this was a terrible failure And that's a completely reasonable interpretation and whether you think it's right or wrong, it's reasonable But it depends on a sense of the war as a specific moment As a war, as a momentary thing, it lasted a few weeks, and then it's over and then you walk away having pocketed your achievement, the thing you wanted to get done, your goal, or you walk away without having pocketed it And that is perfectly reasonable American perspective It was like walking into the Middle East, accomplishing something that's in America's interest and walking out. It has nothing to do with the Israeli perspective. It's completely different from the Israeli perspective And the reason it's completely different is very simple. Israel is existentially threatened by Iran Iran has bent its entire foreign policy to seek the demolition of the Jewish state And This doesn't look to the Israelis like a war. If this escalates into weeks of fighting It still won't be a war. It'll be a battle in a much larger longer ideological contest and standoff that'll escalate many more times before it's over We're not watching right now A war We're watching the latest battle or skkirmish twenty year war that has already lasted much longer than most people realize I want to lay out what this looks like Israelis. If all you follow is American news, American interpretation of things, British news, the British analysis of things Everything looks very small, memories are very short and the ideological substrates And the long term visions on the Iranian side, on the Israeli side, Hezbollah They disappear. They're never part of the discussion in the West, and these are the deepest drivers. all sides And so I want to get into those so that this makes sense. Now we're not going to get into deep theology. This is quick. and we're going to try and just explain why people behave the way they behave right now very, very briefly. for those interested in the deeper theological genealogy of this Iranian regime, whyy it behaves the way it behaves, whyy it destroys the way it destroys, why it's so oppressive to its own people and so violent and aggressive across the Middle East and throughout the world. whyy it thinks it is a revolution against the West Go to episode ninety three. That's a two hour dive into all kinds of different thinkers. Obviously I don't cover the entire issue in two hours. Just a kind of, as we say in Hebrew, a taste on the edge of the fork of how deep and serious and thoughtful that regime really is and why we stand facing profound thought and political ideas that will continue to drive more war So what did the Israelis see For two decades, Iran has waged a deliberate multif frront campaign against Israel It's not a series of disconnected crises, the two thousand six warar in Lebanon, the, you know, different kinds of the June war last year It's one long confrontation. It's been fought through proxies uclear infrastructure, missiles and drones, technological development. And now it is shifting to periodic direct exchanges because of an escalation that Israel sought. And Israel sought that escalation becausecause it wanted to disrupt what Iran's desired way of handling this decades long war was, which was the slow building up of infrastructure and the slow worsening of Israeli situation and the slow demolition of Israel without ever escalating fast enough for Israeli firepower to come into play Well if that was the schedule and the strategy on the other side, the Israeli side figured Maybe our firepower is our best tactic, our best way of actually disrupting. We need to exact massive costs from Iran. for a strategy built on proxies built on dealing us costs without Iran itself suffering Cast This is a long confrontation If we walk away from this February war haaving perceived ourselves to have lost it. That doesn't mean very much Because everyone knows in Iran in Israel, in Lebanon that there'll be another one Remember the Naser years in Egypt when Gamalabbd Naser was president of Egypt Between nineteen fifty six and nineteen seventy three Israel and Egypt and sometimes different Arab states that joined Egypt in the war fought four major rounds, four major wars the the Suez warar Desh operation, as it's called in Hebrew, the six day warar in ' sixty seven The warar of attrition from sixty nine to seventy one and the Yonki poor War in nineteen seventy three Each one was called the war. Each one had a beginning and an end. Each one is taught even today in universities as a single contained entity, a single contained moment, exchange of fire, a single contained development. But they were not They were battles in a single protracted ideological struggle strategic struggle Nas's Egypt wanted to erase Israel, and he wanted to do that as part of a larger Arab project a larger project of, as he saw it, unifying the Arab world, an Arab nationalist revival The Arab world was backward. The Arab world was poor. The Arab world was struggling to come out of the imperial period, of the colonial period An Arab victory over the Jews over this colonialist entity, this colonialist upstart in their midst as the Arab side, as Nasser talked about it would create a revival and would form a kind of catalyst for an anti Western Arab revolution that would bring the Arabs back onto the world stage, powerful and dignified And for the Israelis sururvival Therefore It didnn't mean winning one war and then going off and doing other things Survival meant winning round after round after round. Ye after year after year. P peopleople talk now about the triumphalism of the Israelis after ' sixty seven, the tremendous victory, tripling or even more the size of the country of the territory under the country's control in six days to be Israeli at that moment That sense of relief was enormous, but it was relief. It wasn't triumphalism. They were digging mass graves. Before the war began, they thought they could lose. thirteen thousand graves were dug in the biggest park in Tel Aviv in Yaron Park literally days before the war, That's the scale of the harm they thought would be would be dealt to Israel if the war didn't go well Perfectly. But it didnt they didn't know that it would go perfectly And so there was this palpable relief And then justust two years later Soldiers are dying every week on the Egyptian front in the attrition war. And then two years after that or four years after that. The seventy three War. which The Arabs proved that even though we had attained massive strategic surprise and had massive superiority in certain weapon systems and capabilities They could they could surprise us And they could defeat us in the short term, in particular battles What happened in the Sinai The Egyptians were enormously successful in the crossing of the canal. The Syrians totally surprised and in some parts of the Galen Heights wiped out the Israeli forces there And so the danger was tremendous. And that's why in ' seventy three, the Israelis made a decision. They had to start dealing far more damage. to the Arab side with each war And so in ' seventy three, if you follow UN resolutions, there's good reason for the Israelis to not trust the UN like the UN, or believe anything the UN has ever said Partly because as Abbea Iiben once said, the UN is an umbrella that folds in the rain. It doesn't work when it starts raining. In other words, UN peacekeepers on your border will leave if Things look like they're going to be a war, right? They don't actually protect you. They sit and watch and then form human shields for the likes of Hezbllah. Hezbollah dug a lot of infrastructure under unFL forces But another reason the Israelis don't like the UN is a sense of real real betrayal When the Arab world is invading Israel There are no UN resolutions in those first couple of days of the seventy three War UN Security Council resolutions start to really ramp up, and I think there'll be four of them. in the last two weeks, becausecause in the last two weeks of that three week war, The Israelis are bombing the Syrian industrial base generations backwards. They're exacting massive punishment So that the next war, they're explaining to the Syrians, they're explaining to the Egyptians. will really cost you becausecause this war was was a close thing After twenty years of battle after battle after battle, in this long war It was big, it was traumatic and surviving required winning enough rounds and absorbing enough of the enemy's punishment and eventually forcing a change in the enemy's calculation The same logic applies today The Islamic Republic of Iran Founding ideology Kawama doctrine, Resistance doctrine. episode ninety three treats Israel's elimination att least it's permanent reduction to a besieged barely sovereign or not at all sovereign entity The disarming of the Jews, the Islamic rule over Jews, which is really the deepest demand It treats Israel's elimination. core strategic goal of the regime as a defining goal, an identity of the regime The nuclear program. proxy armies in Lebanon in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen Even in Gaza It's complicated in Gaza, Hamas is Sunni By the way, Hamas cut all ties with Iran When Hezbollah were massacring Sunnis in the Syrian Civil War, There's a gap there. It's not a simple proxy Do doesn't take direct orders and does what Iran says. the way Hezbollah does. Hezbollah will send its men to die and will drag Lebanon into endless war literally at Iran's order C come us home Functionally, the capabilities of Hamas were built up by Iran, the funding for those capabilities, the planning. A great deal of that is Iran So functunionally, even Hamas is a kind of proxy, certainly when it comes to facing Israel together as well as the Houthis, as well as all the different militias in Iraq and Syria the direct missile barrages from twenty twenty four until now These are all instruments of a single long term objective, and that objective is the destruction of Israel. We've talked about this a great deal. The basic core idea is the Jews of Israel are the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back. and this ideology of Islamic restoration and revival that Iran's regime was born to serve sees the defeat of Israel as the first step, the necessary first step for Islam's return into history as a powerful conquering force So the June warar Last year and the February War of this year weren't sudden eruptions. They weren't new wars. They weren't, oh my Godd there's a war in the Middle East They were Tptical escalations, they were battles, they were engagements in a conflict that has been running since the early two thousands in a conflict whose missilile arsenals whose air Forceces Bil out and prepared for twenty years And Israel right about then began to treat that Iranian threat as existential not just, you know, terroristic Why do I think Israel is structurally positioned to win It can lose battles. It can walk away from this battle, not having won any of its objectives Israel is nevertheless structurally much, much more likely to win than Iran defeat for Israel means national destruction It's that simple If the Iranians are capable of imposing on Israel death and destruction and annihilation, they will They won't stop before that Iran's leaders, Iran's proxies, they've been explicit about this for decades The Jewish state is illegitimate. It must be removed from the map And by the way Not illegitimate for anti colonial Western ideological reasons. They talk about that constantly But for Islamic reasons But an enemy's stated goal again and again and again, including in the last three years is your elimination That's a tremendous military advantage because you fight with strategic seriousness Israelis disagree on everything, fight in the streets on everything and unify totally in the face of Iran The Israeli left right now in the run up to an Israeli election isn't putting out press releases slamming Netanyahu for dragging the country to war? but for failing failing to defeat the enemy for not fighting the war intelligently and strongly enough. Unity driven by an understanding of the enemy's eliminationist purpose as an event Also, when the enemy wants to kill you, You innovate Always innovate under pressure. Necessity is the mother of invention You Anthing it takes to maintain qualitative edges in intelligence and air power in cyber and missile defense Because quantity favors the other side, your enemy's population is nine times larger and that's just Iran itself, not its proxies. Israel has the highest spending on R and D per capita on earth Partly that comes from the culture of Israel. Ply that comes from desperate need. These are huge advantages. And you also accept Temporary isolation just like Iran has a very high pain threshold, and this is the argument in episode ninety three, given to it by its deep ideological and theological U origins. and overriding regime understanding of the world and sense of its own role in the world. Israel has a very high pain threshold a very high pain threshold that has surprised its enemies because their whole argument was you're a bunch of Western weaklings. You're going to fold at the first sign of trouble. You'll never dare to invade Hezbollah strongholds in South Lebanon It turnurns out Israeli soldiers will walk into anything in anywhere It T turns out the Israeli Air Force will overfly Iran will'll face Russian and Chinese electronic warfare and missile defense systems that turned out not to be able to do anything against the Israelis But that you only ever really find out in battle It turns out the Jews will fight And it turns out that they will accept global isolation and hatred and they will accept massive economic pain. And for those who want to sanction Israel They should probably be aware that the Israelis genuinely think their enemies in the region want to eliminate them Now if you understand this, you can begin to map out how the future of this conflict will go This is again Iran's eliminationist rhetoric and eliminationist purpose are a tremendous Israeli military advantage. Clarity of the stakes involved produed tremendous resilience in Israeli society Another advantage is Israel's democracy for all the inighting for all the bitter arguments Democracy self correct Failures are debated in public. Nobody's going to shut up the Israelis about what they think Netanyu did wrong Who in Iran can have a debate publicly and openly about how a regime and a leadership has taken a country that has one of the largest energy reserves on Earth and one of the largest talent pools on Earth and driven it into the ground until itss nominal GDP per capita is that of Haiti For forty seven years, it's accomplished almost nothing It's a failure as a state. And for no reason other than a regime, and nobody's allowed to say so in Iran itself without a danger of disappearing or being murdered in the street Well in Israel, failure is debated publicly Inquiries are held, governments fall. Prans are revised, Netanyahu is not doing well in the polls and he knows it And he's desperately trying to figure a way to please enough Israelis to survive politically A market economy produced by a free society. sustains a kind of tech superiority Tptation, innovation that Iran simply doesn't have These aren't abstract virtues, democracy, free markets, These aren't you know moral arguments They're hard advantages. when you face a long term kind of confrontation that Iran has imposed on Israel. Israel hass repeatedly turned military surprises and intelligence lapses of the enemy into long term strategic gains. It's been doing it for generations, and these are the core structural reasons why And Iran has no feedback mechanisms that are in remotely similar The regime's only actual strategy is to be able to suffer permanently and Tally That's it That's the strategy. And to impose suffering on its way down, it plans to set the entire Middle East on fire And then it went and told the Jews that it's definitely going to come and kill them all So they have to take it down. And this is an important point The Jews of Israel cannot be expected to sit this out Trump is here for a couple more years He wants The strait of Hormu is opened. He needs to reach some kind of accommodation with Iran. I don't know what's happening. I don't know if he's contining, I don't know if he's going back Ba I don't know cannot expect from the Jews of Israel. to sit by the side and let America's interests overcome The Israeli need to not eventually be destroyed by this movement that's willing to burn its own society to the ground on the altar of the destruction of Israel for theological reasons. Iran can't ever admit. this regime, not the country, this regime can't ever admit that it is failing. can't ever stop campaign. it's literally spent too much, the costs of going after Israel in this way T great it to ever admit failure and to ever stop. And the only way this ends is their undoing If they admit failure, if they turn around back to Iranians and say, hey, we're that regime, we're that elite destroyed everything for you, that oppressed you, that stole your economy The IRGC owns half of Iran's GDP. It's a military that serves the suupreme leader, not even the government, which isn't exactly an elected government. It's elected from a couple of candidates that the regime chooses But the IRGC is a military that doesn't even pretend to be under that pretend democratic system And it owns have the GDP of Iran It has to ride this to the end. And it'll fail and then its story will unravel and its entire justification for repression at home. and for all of its adventurism abroad will fail with So there's an asymmetry here Israel fights to survive with all the tools that democracies can bring to bear in war And because there's an eliminationist enemy, democracies haven't won a lot of wars lately Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam The enemy has never been an eliminationist. It's always been a political contest. What The other political side thought in your country mattered more than what the enemy could do on the ground over on the other side of the world. in the case of Vietnam in the case of Afghanistan. If there was an existential eliminationist enemy, the United States wouldn't pull back. It would pay the costs that are required It would defeat the enemy, it would shatter its cities. It would rule it for five years. It would do Japan. It would do Nazi Germany, denzification in Germany. It would do what it takes. because it's an existential threat Israel faces an existential threat from Israel's perspective, this is a war against the Nazis and it's going to see it through to the end because the alternative is them seeing it through to the end. Israel fights to survive, it fights to degrade the threat Iran's ideology compels it to keep fighting, even when the costs become catastrophic for its own people. And for the societies it claims to champion that its proxies are systematically demolishing And that's the war And if Israel doesn't win it That's as much of a disaster for Lebanon long term as it is for Israel Mukawa is not conventional statecraft or politics. prizes attrition, It demands ideological mobilization, permanent mobilization There are no decisive victories. There's no economic development There's no accountability. for Amukawama leadership And that's why it has turned Lebanon and Gaza and Syria. Syria's regime, the Assid regime could not have murdered six hundred thousand mostly Sunnis out Iran seeing it as an important art piece of the architecture of Mukawama Yemen The Yemeni Civil War Almost four hundred thousand dead, of probablyro a quarter million just starved to death, including eighty five thousand children was a war between Sunnis and the Shyia Mukawama And those battlefields Destructiveness. is treated as acceptable by these leaders, by these movements, by these ideologues. It's even useful Dead of Gaza. Hamas has again and again and again said The dead of Gaza are the mobilizing of the world to their cause Will it destroy Israel The mobilizing of the world? No But it'll create a space, a political space in which destroying Israel is a little easier. And Hamas's plan is not independence for Palestine. These are tyrants The plan is Israel's destruction And the death of every Palestinian on the altar of that plan is to Hamas, legitimate because the goal is the redemption of Islam. And if you don't believe me Look it up What it means The Hamas's charter says Palestine is wak is an Islamic trust. What the word Mukawama means as an ideology What the Hamas and Hezbollah Iranian vision for Israel share that allows them to ally in the way that they have across a real and deep and violent and old ideological and theological gap between Sunni and Shia Ka. never walks away Conflict will last round after round after round becausecause retreating exposes the core claim. be wrong and all the costs that they impose on their societies for that vision turn out to be wrong. Once you have demolished your economy demolished your society Dress and brutalize your people. On the altar of this idea, the idea can never be allowed to lose to admit losing And the idea is an idea of sustained, resilient, tolerant Pain tolerant resistance And so it says, this generation will only suffer and the next will only and the one after will see the great triumph entirely built to make sure It is never accountable. it never does what the people want And it never stops fighting. and it also never builds anything That's the enemy Israel faces. That's what the Mukwama means. That is how Kasan Naswuala talked about it, the leader of Hezbllah And so now we face a Naser who for twenty years tried to redeem the Arabs through the destruction of Israel. this time it's for God notot for secular nationalism. And this time it has built into it. This is its great military advantage, a willingness to suffer a lionizing of of martyrdom and mass martyrdom. Kam us are proud of what they have done. to Gaza. And we face them And it's going to be dececades Hezbollah was built for decades. It's Iran's most powerful forward arm We've degraded a great deal of it Every last shred of it is willing to fight and die And so it has to and it has to die And there's no daylight for Lebanon until that happens. Lebanon doesn't know how to tell them to stop Pools of Lebanon tell us that ninety percent of the Drus of the Christians of the Sunnis want them to stop. That's a big majority of the Lebanese, some of the Shia also But most Sia still believe in the Mukawama. Most Siass believe the Kllah represents them Mosthyia are afraid of what comes. in Lebanon after Hezbollah is disarmed because they're afraid of the vengeance of the rest of the Lebanese after what Hezbollah has done to Lebanon Syria was once aligned with Iran. That alliance meant that Israel had to target it. And then we discovered that actually it was a regime that was very fragile And it fell Gaza will not Rise to a new and better day As long as Hamas rules there That's true if the Israelis are evil people who don't ever want Gaza to prosper and rebuild And it's true if the Israelis are good people who just really think Hamaz has to be pulled out the way the Nazis had to be pulled out of Germany and the fire bombing of Dresden was justified by that It's true, no matter what you think of the Israelis Board of peace The entire Trump peeace plan for Gaza approved by the UN Security Counc withith the entire Arab world looking, begging to spend money on Gaza's rebuilding, begging for it all to start. with Israel being forced by Trump. The Palestinians don't understand. this moment with Trump is a moment in which they have leverage over Netanyahu. future Democratic president set against Netanyu Fighting Israel, whether Israel' iss led by saying, or anybody outse Denying Israel military aid or military support or even just the sale of weapons. Well, if Israel's not buying weapons from the Americans and doesn't need that supply and certainly isn't getting anything Israel's less going to be answerable to the Americans not more And if sanctions come from the Americans because they go completely anti Israel Violently, totally. Israel iss even more free of the American ability to influence them This is a moment where Trump wants to deliver a better future But Hamas won't give up its arms it won't do it. could at this moment push back the Israelis, hold the Israelis at bay. Have everyone holding the Israelis at bay? I think the Israelis want this, but you know what? you don't have to agree with me Trump can deliver for Gaza more than any Democratic president, that's one of those ironies that history sometimes produces, but they won't take it because Hamas is a Mukawama organization. The rubble of those parts of Ghaza that are pretty much demolished is a sign that they're winning maybe History doesn't always follow happy little arcs. And if winning is still the destruction of the Jews That rubble is just going to be rubble They won't actually give them victory each round of escalation as under NASA. exacts a higher price from the Mukawama enemy from Iran's economy from the populations that unfortunately are under the influence of these Makkwam organizations, under their oppressive regimes And it's an ideology that makes any kind of de escalation or graceful de escalation or strategic retreat Almost impossible The regime needs the confrontation, survives on the confrontation The confrontation justifies its existence The confrontation justifies its domestic oppression That's why even a weak in Iran. will continue to inflict damage every step of the way It will destroy the infrastructures of the Gulf states on its way down. The Israelis still can't let it survive. And that's it That's the core and heart of this The goal is to bring it down faster. in ways that allow it to cause less damage. There is no ability to leave it intact. And faster is ten years and quite a bit of damage. Every battle Every missile barrage, every proxy attack All the wreckage, physical, economic, human that the Mukawa will leave behind. ammong the Israelis proxy territories. and inside Iran itself All of that. is the Mukalwama History doesn't tell us how this is going to end. We're going through history for the first time But their' patterns And sometimes there are vague rules if you're willing to have your rules break down every once in a while. The Israelis think that they identified a rule Nasser's whole vision exhausted itself Eventually Egypt paid an enormous cost in war, in territory and prestige and pride in development that was destroyed by the kind of regime, the total control regime that went to this war after war after war And that cost of that perpetual confrontation is why Egypt pulled out. It's why Egypt made the peace first C the heart, the engine of that pan Arabist vision that drove war after war after war was the thing that first turned to peace because the price became not worth it It didn't look like it was going to succeed. The Israelis were flourishing Their military successes were growing, not shrinking. The Israelis in fifty six were better than they were in forty eight and in sixty seven better than in fifty six. And Egypt's economy was not and new Soviet hardware didn't change it The weakness of the kinds of regimes that took over the Ab world after imperialism left were too great, those weaknesses were too fundamental and structural, those incompetent dictatorships to be overcome by new Soviet hardware The piece that followed wasn't great. It wasn't perfect, It was very cold It wasn't peace. It wasn't normalization Israelis might a little bit vacation in the Sinai and the intervening years but certainly don't love and respect Egyptians or vice versa There's no warmth there But it ended the wars. Iran's confrontation with Israel Iran's demand to destroy Israel Iran's demand to be allowed to forever build against Israel until Israel's elimination and Israel to be depicted as the aggressor for wanting to escalate early rather than watch a slow escalation that eventually destroys it. is in its middle phase 's been going for twenty years, we have to assume it'll go for twenty more blows to Iran, the costs to Iran are rising, and that is the Israeli strategy The blows to the proxies, the costs to its air defenses, the cost to its missile production The cost to its leadership You want to lead Iran in this war? you probably will die That's important to know Go for it if you really truly believe in the martyrdom We suspect they do anyway So taking them out creates vacuums, creates off balance. Maybe we'll shape a little bit the calculations going forward But if you're planning our elimination You're a legitimate target The nuclear program has been repeatedly set back and will continue to be repeatedly set back at almost any cost because the Israelis are imagining a device set off four hundred meters over Tel Aviv and the Mukawama access will be bloodied and dismantled and bloodied again and dismantled again until it is gone The threat's not going away tomorrow. Iran has missiles, Iran has drones We're entering a period of warfare where the technology of cheap missiles, cheap drones is incredibly effective. We've seen what's happening with Ukraine. We've seen what's happening with the Houthis, threatening the Saudis We've seen what's happening to the Israeli military facing these cheap drones against Fezbah and Lebanon, Now that Fzbeli shifted to that strategy. And we see what Iran is capable of doing with that cheap, plentiful technology of small attack drones and missiles in the Strait of Hormuz be responses, developing The oil will now pump not through hormves Saudi Arabia pumps seven million barrels a day through its east West pipeline now, avoiding hormones Now they're going to Probably I assume we have to assume if they were wise to put lines down that can carry four times that. and then the Strait of Hormz is meaningless. The Strait of Hormz no longer has strategic relevance. There'll be changes As long as they have the ideological commitment to destroy Israel Israel will find technological responses Israel's civilians, Israel's soldiers, there's a unity on this front on this point because of that understanding of the enemy that the world doesn't understand. and the entire campaign to make Israel into the most evil thing that ever existed even set against the enemies in the Middle East who have fought wars with ten times the civilian deaths. Explicitly genocidal wars. Nobody cares that Syria doesn't matter. The Israelis are the evil of the world. We are basically statistically, functionally the last living Jews in the Etern hemisphere Andother they're coming for us An Arab world whose Jewish community is emptied en masse from everywhere to the last man, woman and child practically Almost exactly Jews cannot today live in Damascus or Baghdad where they had lived for a thousand years before anyone speaking Arabic showed up in those cities You think it's an accident, the Jews who come from the Arab world tend to vote more hawkish in Israeli elections than Jews from Europe. Israel's destruction, the Jews' destruction It's not something that the Jews have to submit to The Jews have staying power, the stickiness. Resilience Kawama claims to have, but doesn't. all it really has is the willingness to destroy everything And we'll see who wins Thanks for listening