3/11/26: Trump Freaks Over Strait Of Hormuz, Mearsheimer Says US Losing War, Iran To Hit Israel Hard

12:41Saagar Enjeti:And we have some strategic petroleum reserve that we can release the G7 have their own emergency kind of global reserve that they're planning on releasing. And so there's that option. The other option is for the US to start accompanying ships, protecting them as they move through the Strait of Hormuz. And you had an absolutely incredible moment yesterday in the financial markets where the U.S. Energy Secretary, and we can put up this next element, Chris Wright, he comes out and he announces that the U.S. Navy has successfully escorted a tanker through the strait. So if you knew that he was about to announce that, or if you knew that that had happened and you bought oil futures, you made an enormous amount of money over the next five minutes.

13:41Saagar Enjeti:as well. Sorry, you lost an enormous amount of money if you owned oil. If you were short oil, you did great.

13:48Emily Jashinsky:I thought you were going to say if you were specific on poly market.

13:51Saagar Enjeti:Right. Well, that too. But so oil prices crashed because it's like, oh, amazing. So the Navy successfully escorted a tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. The cavalry has arrived. The battle is saved. The world oil supply is secured. Five minutes later, he deletes the tweet. Imagine being the trader who's like refreshing that tweet. It's like, tweet has been deleted. You're like, oh God. Because as it turns out, it was either a lie or it was untrue. We need to get to the bottom of this. Many, many, many millions of dollars changed hands and the US lost whatever little tiny credibility it had left.

14:37Saagar Enjeti:So Leavitt, Carolyn Leavitt was asked about this. And let's get her response.

14:42Krystal Ball:I was made aware of this post. I haven't had a chance to talk to the energy secretary about it directly. However, I know the post was taken down pretty quickly. And I can confirm that the US Navy has not escorted a tanker or a vessel at this time, though, of course, that's an option the president has said he will absolutely utilize if and when necessary at the appropriate time.

15:02Saagar Enjeti:Okay. So nevermind. That did not happen.

15:07Emily Jashinsky:This is a cabinet secretary.

15:09Saagar Enjeti:This is the cabinet. This is the energy secretary.

15:11Emily Jashinsky:Energy secretary.

15:12Saagar Enjeti:It'd be one thing of the HUD secretary. Yes. Like heard a little gossip and tweeted that. Right. The energy secretary. Yeah. That's, that's the, that's the guy who would know that. Also the umbrella nuclear policy organization.

15:26Emily Jashinsky:So not looking great if you're just firing off tweets and deleting them about fragile geopolitical questions. And we're going to talk later with Jeremy about the either the lack of a strategy or the way that the strategy is unfolding.

15:40Saagar Enjeti:But for a glimpse into how completely bankrupt the U.S. approach is right now, you've got Fox & Friends buddies just throwing out random plays. Let's take an island and then control the oil. Let's play A5 here.

16:02Krystal Ball:Love to see him take Karg Island, that oil island. He'd be just like Venezuela. We control their oil. 90 % of the oil goes to this little island. The president talked about it in 1988 interview, and I think he should grab it.

16:15Saagar Enjeti:And I think that gets to the folly that was at the heart of this entire Operation Epstein-Fury to begin with, which was it's going to be like Venezuela. And so it went great. We went in, we got Maduro, and then they just handed us the oil, and it was amazing. and so they keep trying to reconfigure what is obviously a completely different situation into that and I think they're looking for something that they can do and then declare victory but doing that will be I mean do you have any thoughts on that? That would be a bloodbath holding it would be quite difficult I don't think it's serious

17:01Emily Jashinsky:but I haven't thought any of this was serious

17:04Saagar Enjeti:and they've tried to do it anyway

17:07Emily Jashinsky:I thought it was totally serious from Brian Kilmeade Oh he's being serious Right But that's to your point If you If you don't think It's hard to tell what's serious when it's being tossed out between Fox and Friends and the president We just put the president's tweet about the true social about the minds up on the screen And he's like, if for any reason, the mind, like you never know what he knows and what he's serious about, what he's not serious about. So you have no choice but to take it all seriously. And I think that's exactly what the right the right position is. So, oh, he's joking. Well, we're in war and people are dying.

17:43Emily Jashinsky:So take him seriously. I agree with you. I think that would be a nightmare. And the long term, what does that look like if they're trying to come up with some type of deal about the future? What is the long-term prospect of holding oil island, as Brian Kilmeade put it? What is the plan for a year from now, for 10 years from now, if you're holding oil island? How is that going to make things significantly better? How is it going to make the situation less tense? I mean, just none of it makes sense.

18:16Saagar Enjeti:Yeah, I just think that it would be very difficult for them to actually hold it.

18:19Emily Jashinsky:Right, exactly.

18:20Saagar Enjeti:And so to the question of, because this is...

18:23Emily Jashinsky:It's basically putting, since we're talking about mines, it's putting like a trip wire. Yeah, right in the middle of the hole.

18:30Saagar Enjeti:Yes, exactly. So the question really is, you know, can Iran withstand the bombardment that they're taking and continue to fire their own ballistic missiles longer than the U.S. can withstand the cracking of the foundations of the global economy? And that's the key question. And the question underneath that is what happens to the oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz? So we have some actual data that's emerging that sheds a little light on this and doesn't, I don't think, would give comfort necessarily to either side. But it's important to have the facts here. So you can put up this drop site post from Twitter.

19:10Saagar Enjeti:The point they're making here is that about 35 % of the oil that normally goes through the Strait of Hormuz is still going through. But let's break that down a little bit. So normally you were averaging about 15 million barrels per day. Now of that, 1.2 million was Iranian. And that is still getting through. And it's mostly going to China. So you're actually, what you're concerned about is about 13.8 million barrels per day. So what's going on with that? So according to that, 5.5 million is still moving. Now, you want to subtract the 1.2 from there to get what actually matters, because the oil that Iran is shipping to China is not foundational to the Western kind of capital markets.

19:59Saagar Enjeti:So that gets you down to what? So that's 3.3 million barrels a day still going through. So what's happening is that Saudi Arabia is trying to move a lot of their oil through a pipeline and then out the Red Sea. So they're saying more than 2 million barrels per day are currently moving toward the Red Sea. So if they can't get it out through the Strait of Hormuz, they're going to move it that way. Um, the UAE, um, is, is trying to use, uh, the Fujaira pipeline to move about 1.8 million barrels per day. Um, and then there's about 500 ,000 barrels per day, um, from tankers that are turning off their trackers and kind of sneaking through.

20:46So 500 ,000 is, it's not much like that's not, that's, that's not enough to service the global

20:52Saagar Enjeti:economy. But if they can move many millions through these pipelines, now the problem sets in, you can hit a pipeline. If we go up the escalation ladder to those kinds of strikes, you can certainly hit a pipeline and take that right offline. And the Houthis have not really gotten involved yet. So if the Houthis said, no, actually, you're not doing this anymore, which is interesting because remember, again, we're telling you the truth here. we've told you from the beginning that the houthis are supported by iran but are independent actors they make their own decisions in the in the u.s the western press would say no they're just they're just the the handmaidens of iran they do exactly what iran tells them right this moment confirms it like if they if they did exactly what iran wants them to do would they not be like launching tons of ballistic missiles at their allies and shutting the Red Sea down?

21:54Saagar Enjeti:And they're not yet. They're talking about, you know, they're strategizing. We may see them enter the fray, but they haven't.

22:01Emily Jashinsky:It's also, though, interesting because what is Iran right now? Like, what is the government of Iran? Is it acting in total concert? It's hard to know what would be getting telegraphed. But no, I mean, I see what you're saying.

22:16Saagar Enjeti:So if they come in and shut down the Red C, then you're talking about a whole different ballgame. But if they don't, you might be able, and they don't hit these pipelines, you may be able to trickle through enough oil to keep prices at a place where the global population can continue to stomach the attack.

22:36Emily Jashinsky:Maybe, right. And I don't know. It's just with this Trump administration now talking about how they think they have a three to four week like landing strip basically it does go to why we start hearing them chirp now about declaring mission accomplished and victory they're obviously very very very nervous about this and they should be because of everything that was just laid out

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25:19Emily Jashinsky:Let's get to Mearsheimer. Let's do it. Let's talk about Professor John Mearsheimer's recent remarks about, as we were just saying, who's really winning? What does winning look like? Crystal flagged this moment for us. A bunch of senators, by the way, They went into a briefing yesterday on the war. That's where Chris Murphy came out and put out the tweet that he referred to in the last block. We were discussing the Strait of Hormuz. We have some audio video of Senator Blumenthal also emerging from that briefing. Before we get to it, let's take a listen here to John Mearsheimer to sort of set the table as to what's been accomplished, quote unquote, accomplished so far.

25:57Emily Jashinsky:B1.

25:58Krystal Ball:It's quite clear that the war is not going well for the United States and that President Trump, I think, would like to put an end to it. And the problem that he faces is he can't find an off ramp. I think nobody can tell a plausible story about how this war ends.

26:23Ryan Grim:if we had decisively defeated Iran the way we decisively defeated both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, then you can say the war is over with, we are the winner, and we're going to impose terms on the loser.

26:44Krystal Ball:But that's not what's happened here. They haven't won anything approximating a decisive victory.

26:52Ryan Grim:And in a very important way, the Iranians have an incentive to continue the war, to turn it into a protracted war of attrition.

27:05Krystal Ball:And they have the means to do that.

27:08Emily Jashinsky:So obviously, definitions of what that means have been floating around from this administration itself. Last week, Caroline Levitt had to come out and enumerate the list of objectives that the administration had in Iran because so many different things were floating around from different members of the administration, which is normal enough on a day that ends in Y, a lot more egregious when you are at war, obviously. So Donald Trump has said he wants unconditional surrender, Ryan. He said it's about missiles, it's about nukes. So some of the challenge here politically for the administration, but also just for a normal American trying to determine why seven lives have already been lost.

27:55Emily Jashinsky:We're looking at new numbers about how many people have been injured. Actually, why don't we just go ahead and roll B3 here? I'm some new information about this. B3.

28:06Krystal Ball:Reuters has reported that about 150 U.S. service members have been injured so far. Can you confirm that number and elaborate on that?

28:14Emily Jashinsky:I can't confirm the exact number. I know it's within that ballpark, but I would defer you to the Pentagon

28:21Krystal Ball:for a specific number of wounded or injured thus far.

28:24Emily Jashinsky:So as people are trying to determine what the United States is doing, why, what is being sacrificed, why. Here is Richard Blumenthal, B2, talking about what he took from a briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday for senators. My questions have been unanswered.

28:51Krystal Ball:and I will demand answers because the American people deserve to know. And I guess I am most concerned about the threat to American lives of potentially deploying our sons and daughters on the ground in Iran. We seem to be on a path toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran to accomplish any of the potential objectives here. And there is also, as disturbingly as anything else, the specter of active Russian aid to Iran putting in danger American lives. literally Russia seems to be aiding our enemy actively and intensively with intelligence and perhaps with other means and China also may be assisting Iran.

29:58Emily Jashinsky:So Blumenthal's a Russia hawk, we'll get to that point in just a moment, but this is ran the multiple layers here of the politics and the substance and you have a senator coming out of briefing saying any of the potential objectives, not even able to zero in on like one of the administration's objectives because we're overall objective, because the messaging has been all over the place. But saying, you know, here's my interpretation of Iran. We're at an inflection point where either the administration decides to cut bait and define down what the objectives were, what victory looks like, or put, as Blumenthal said, troops on the ground in Iran to actually tackle substantively, whether it's the nuclear question, the missile question.

30:44Emily Jashinsky:I mean, I was talking to Brian Dean Wright, who's a former CIA guy on my show the other day, and he was like, well, you could put special forces on the ground to pull the nuclear material out of the dirt. Well, that's boots on the ground. That's boots on the ground. So it does feel like an inflection point right now. Yes.

31:03Saagar Enjeti:And so Senator Chris Murphy also came out of that meeting and did a Twitter thread that would make when add some of this in post. And he said, you know, he said that, like, it's totally incoherent what they're hearing internally and what they're hearing in this classified briefings. and it contradicts and conflicts with the rationales that were given to the extent that any were given at all ahead of the war. So one of the things he said, the war goals do not involve destroying Iran's nuclear program. You're like, what? He writes, this is surprising since Trump says over and over, this is a key goal.

31:41So behind the scenes, planners are saying, no, it's not actually about the nuclear program.

31:47Saagar Enjeti:Second, he says, they confirmed, quote, regime change is also not on the list. So that was the other thing that we were told explicitly was an objective here. So then he, then he's the way he frames it was so they're going to spend hundreds of billions of your taxpayer dollars, get a whole bunch of Americans killed, and a hardline regime, probably a more anti-American hardline regime will still be in charge. And he says, OK, so what are the goals? He says, it seems primarily destroying lots of missiles and boats and drone factories. But the question that stumped them, what happens when you stop bombing and they restart production?

32:27Saagar Enjeti:They hinted, this is the planners, they hinted at more bombing, which is, of course, as he says, endless war. And then on the Strait of Hormuz, as we talked about in the last segment, they had no plan. So that does actually fit with what we've been thinking about as the actual strategy in place here, which is not to liberate the Iranian people, has nothing to do with the nuclear program. We're not doing nation building anymore because the public has said we don't want to do, quote unquote, nation building anymore. So we're just going to do nation destruction. We're going to nation unbuild this thing.

33:04Saagar Enjeti:We're going to try to cause as much damage as we possibly can. then we're going to stop and the second that they try to start rebuilding anything we're going to attack them again that explains why Iranians feel like they have to take a huge cost from us so that we don't think that that's actually an okay thing to do to another country to just keep mowing the lawn to just just kill them whenever we feel like it right

33:31Emily Jashinsky:for as long as we feel like it by the way also not a strategy that is going to fly with the american people in the long term i mean well it's not let's say it may be electorally pal palatable because people are suffering at home and have a million different priorities but it's not the priority of the american people it's so expensive too it's so expensive but to be bogged down in a never-ending conflict um because of a policy choice no yes that's most people would if you explain that most people would be like why are we doing this why are we doing this after the last 20, 30 years. Why are we doing this?

34:07Saagar Enjeti:Yeah. And so Pete Hegseth, our war secretary, as he calls himself.

34:12Emily Jashinsky:Again, much more accurate. You heard it here first.

34:15Saagar Enjeti:There you go. Not a declaration of war. He's our military operations secretary, I guess. The Department of Military Operations saying that we are only intensifying the attacks. Let's roll Hegseth.

34:28Krystal Ball:For example, today will be yet again our most intense day of strikes inside Iran. The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes. Intelligence more refined and better than ever. So that's on one hand. On the other hand, the last 24 hours have seen Iran fire the lowest number of missiles they've been capable of firing yet. Just the bifurcation, just the trend lines that we talked about on our first briefing.

35:01Saagar Enjeti:Steve Witkoff was asked about the claims that Russia is helping Iran. Let's roll some Witkoff here.

35:07Jeremy Scahill:Yesterday on the call with the president, the Russians said that they have not been sharing. That's what they said. So, you know, we can take them at their word, but they did say that. And And yesterday morning, and yesterday morning, independently, Jared and I had a call with Ushakov, who reiterated the same. So, you know, that's a better question for the intel people. But let's hope that they're not sharing.

35:36Emily Jashinsky:So how do you see this ending, this war?

35:42Jeremy Scahill:I don't know, Sarah. I know this, that President Trump is the wrong guy to go up against. That's what I know.

35:50Saagar Enjeti:All right. We've got Jeremy Scahill standing by. And so let's ask him a little bit more about, you know, how the back and forth is going. Because Tel Aviv is also getting absolutely hammered overnight last night. Yeah.

36:04Emily Jashinsky:I mean, Hagsus prediction proved to be true that it would be the most intense day. That's why, again, the transition from secretary of defense to secretary of war, much more accurate, came at the perfect time because the entire lie of this being a defensive war only, this is exclusively about national defense, has been exposed in a pretty obvious flamboyant way. And if we're supplying the intel for the Ukrainian strikes on Russia right now, we're just Steve Witkoff is now having these conversations about whether Russia is cooperating with Iran in intelligence sharing. It's the entire approach to this has been I don't need to continue saying it, but it's so obviously a disaster.

36:53Saagar Enjeti:Yes. And we didn't we didn't have your pants. Yes, totally. And we didn't have time to get into a full block on Sudan today, but I did want to update people. And if you've been following our coverage of it, you know that the RSF, which has been on a kind of genocidal rampage throughout Sudan, is backed to the hilt by the UAE. And the U.S. has been being pressured to put some pressure on the UAE to then withdraw its support from the RSF in order to bring this conflict to a final resolution. Instead, now that the U.S. is kind of deeply indebted to the Emiratis, we get the opposite. The U.S. put out a statement yesterday saying that they are designating the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood as a specially designated global terrorist group, which they have not done to the RSF.

37:48This is a huge boon to the RSF. So basically, you can imagine what happened.

37:54Saagar Enjeti:Mohammed bin Zayed is telling Trump, like, you want my cooperation here? Like, what I need from you, I need your help in Sudan. Get off my back about the RSF. And in fact, I want you going after the RSF's enemies. And Trump is like, what is he? I don't care. Fine. Whatever. So we'll have more on that at a further date as the implications of the of the war kind of spill out into Sudan. But let's bring in next Jeremy Scahill.

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40:40Saagar Enjeti:Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said that last night would be the most ferocious attacks by the U.S. and Israel on Iran. But on the other side, the Gulf states and Israel are facing increasingly difficult nights as well. We're getting very little footage, either from either from phones or from news broadcasts, as Israel and the Gulf states are clamping down on the ability of the public or the media to share what's going on. But we did get an interesting kind of clip through Fox News. It kind of gives you an indication of both of those elements. Let's roll this one.

41:15Jeremy Scahill:We have sirens in Tel Aviv. Let's go back to correspondent Nate Foy, who is on the ground there. Hi, Nate.

41:22Krystal Ball:Hey, Martha. So, yeah, as you can hear, the sirens are going off here in Tel Aviv, something that we've seen several times throughout the entire day. And what we could see here momentarily are interceptor missiles fired off. We have seen it right over my shoulder several different times. Again, Iran continues to show an offensive capability launching missiles at central Israel.

41:43Saagar Enjeti:We have one interceptor over my shoulder right now. We can't show you because we can't show landmarks, Martha.

41:51Krystal Ball:But something that has really changed here over the past couple days is the use of these cluster munitions by Iran, where the warhead breaks up into several different bomblets.

42:02Saagar Enjeti:And that's really important because not only does it spread the damage, but it makes it more difficult to defend against. Joining us now is my colleague over at DropSite, Jeremy Scahill. Jeremy, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.

42:16Emily Jashinsky:I'm going to play the role of Tim Dillon in this segment.

42:18Saagar Enjeti:Yes. Jeremy and I were on Tim Dillon. Do not miss that. There are a lot of jokes we can make about that. We're just going to skip those. So I want to put up the article that you wrote with Maz yesterday. The headline here, Trump might want to end the war. Iran won't do it on his terms. Um, so what, what are, what are you guys hearing, um, from Iranian officials about the overtures, uh, whether they actually exist from the United States and how Iranian officials are feeling, um, about kind of re-engaging them?

42:59Ryan Grim:Well, I mean, first on this issue of, you know, negotiations or talk of a ceasefire, um, my understanding from speaking to senior Iranian officials is that there have been periodic periods of outreach from third countries to Iran asking about the possibility of a resumption of negotiations, and the Iranians have rejected those. The United States, Trump and other officials have said, oh, the Iranians are desperate to talk to us. They want this to end. Iran is saying that's a total lie, and that in In fact, it seems to be the United States that through intermediaries is trying to gauge Iran's interest.

43:39Ryan Grim:You see, what we're engaged in here or what we're watching is asymmetric warfare. You have a much more powerful, larger attack force, the United States and Israel. And there's no doubt they have massive military superiority. And, you know, the so-called war secretary, Pete Hegseth, loves to get up every day like a drinking buddy bragging about his exploits from the last weekend and talk about everything that they're bombing and how they're decimating Iran. And they're trying to convince the public that just by showing cool stuff blowing up, that somehow that means that the United States and Israel are decisively winning this war.

44:14Ryan Grim:But the reality is that for the less powerful military force to achieve, quote unquote, victory, they don't have to win militarily. They have to elevate the costs to such a degree that the stronger attacking party decides that it's not worth it anymore. But it's not just that. And this is what we're hearing from Iranian officials. Iran doesn't just want to stop the military onslaught by Israel and the United States. Iran wants to keep fighting so that the entire world, including the United States, understands that if you think you can do this to Iran every four months, pretend you're negotiating and then do surprise attacks, that you have another thing coming.

44:51Ryan Grim:And so that's why the Iranians now, in response to Trump making threats about the Strait of Hormuz have started to be more aggressive. IRGC naval vessels, Trump said that their entire Navy was wiped out. Well, we now understand that the IRGC Navy is giving warnings to ships, and if they don't heed them, they're stopping or attacking those ships. So what we're seeing here is that the Iranians are not just trying to inflict damage or continue to strike in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel, or to continue to strike US military bases in the region. They're also saying we're not interested in a ceasefire on Trump's terms.

45:25Ryan Grim:And we think that they dramatically underestimated Iran's will to fight, overestimated the potential for a domestic uprising and dramatically underestimated Iran's weapons capacity. The Iranians are going into what they call a second phase of this war. They feel they have softened U.S. defenses in the region, so they don't need to fire as many rockets and that they can continue to do damage with more powerful ballistic missiles, but with less frequent or less intense attacks.

45:52Emily Jashinsky:And obviously, the calculus of sharing intelligence that led to the killing of Khomeini with Israel was that you would decimate the command structure. We've heard people talking about this in the government right now and thus create a mess and a power vacuum that's easier for the Kurds or whomever else to step into and change the regime or alter the regime as they discovered they could do with Dossi Rodriguez in Venezuela. So, Jeremy, what is the command structure like right now in terms of you're having these conversations with officials about how they see their strategy? Did the United States severely hamper their ability to organize as the IRGC or as the Iranian government?

46:36Emily Jashinsky:What does that look like right now? What is the sort of coherence organization strategically look like of the Iranian government as they are fighting back against the United States?

46:49Ryan Grim:Well, you know, the United States has not fought a modern nation state since really the end of World War II or the Korean War. And so I think there was a radical underestimation of how solid Iran's bureaucratic structure is, both on a civilian level and a military level. I mean, this is a government that has been building horizontal institutions since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. And in fact, we reported even before the bombs started hitting on February 28th for weeks ahead of this, we were saying that the Iranians were very clear that they expected decapitation strikes. They expected that there would be an attempt that was likely to succeed in assassinating the supreme leader and the rest of the country's official top leadership.

47:36Ryan Grim:And so they created what they called a mosaic defense system. So in advance of the United States attacking Emily, what Iran did was they started to delegate further down the chain of command authority to launch attacks. And they had a predetermined bank of targets throughout the Persian Gulf and in Israel that if the United States and Israel attacked, they would be activated. And so what I'm told by Iranian officials who have access to the planning process in Iran is that in those first 72 hours or so after the U.S. and Israel began attacking, things were essentially on autopilot when it came to the IRGC's aerospace division, which is overseeing the launching of ballistic missiles and attack drones, of which Iran has many because they have their own domestic industry.

48:20And then

48:21Ryan Grim:And once there was a sort of clearing of the dust that the reality was a full-scale existential war was on, that's how Iran saw it, they started to then return to a more centralized strategic operation. And that allowed them to sort of call audibles, I guess you could say. They would assess the damage that was being done in places like Kuwait, in Qatar, in the United Arab Emirates, in Saudi Arabia. They knocked out a very expensive, vital piece of radar equipment in Jordan, another one in the Persian Gulf. That quite significantly damaged the ability of the United States to have early warning detection.

48:58Ryan Grim:They took out two of the most important radars that are essentially the kind of artery of the defensive operations for the United States in the region. And by incapacitating those, you started to see more successful hits that set in. On a political level, I think that the United States messaging on this has evolved. Trump has gone from saying, rise up, dear Iranian people, to saying, yeah, I would take a religious leader. I mean, it could be somebody who's internal and eternal, was the phrase that he used the other day. And so I think a little bit of reality pie is being served right now to the United States.

49:36Ryan Grim:That's not to say that they're not doing massive damage to Iran on a military level. and on a civilian level. But it does seem like their calculations were way, way off. Yeah.

49:48Saagar Enjeti:One thing that has struck me about this is that despite the fact that the U.S. spends billions upon billions of dollars on intelligence and analysis, and also that the U.S. has, I would assume, the most well-funded kind of media apparatus in the world, and certainly in the Western world, they seemed to have been caught off guard by almost everything that has come along, even though Emily wasn't, for instance. Like, you know, you knew that -

50:18Emily Jashinsky:Even Emily.

50:19Saagar Enjeti:Like, Emily does not have a multi-billion dollar intelligence and analysis operation, but you knew that Iran's plan was to turn this into a regional war and was to close the Strait of Hormuz because they said so publicly. And Jeremy reported that, you know, repeatedly. To the question of the Gulf states, I want to ask you about your other piece that you had recently. We can put up what is a C2. This goes to the question. So you're reporting publicly, and the U.S. government is welcome to read the article or not if, you know, they want to have any idea what's going on. It said, Iran weighs tactical shift in Persian Gulf strikes while intensifying attacks on Israel.

51:02Saagar Enjeti:So you reported here that the Iranian assessment was that they had done, that in some ways, I don't want to put words in their mouth, you know, mission was accomplished in a lot of these Gulf states, that they had sufficiently deterred and degraded the U.S. capacity there, but that there were two countries, two Gulf countries, that where that assessment was not met and they were going to continue hitting them, but otherwise they were going to back off some of these Gulf countries and focus more on kind of pummeling Israel and on, you know, restricting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Since you've reported that, what have you seen kind of unfold?

51:42Saagar Enjeti:And is there anything you can add to that from your sources since then?

51:45Ryan Grim:You know, the other day, also, the Iranian foreign minister retweeted a CENTCOM picture showing missiles being launched from the desert of one of those countries. And he said, thank you for confirming that you are using the territory of some of these countries that claim that they weren't going to allow their territory to be used. We've seen a pretty substantial decrease, though, in the number and volume of strikes that have been unleashed against the Persian Gulf. Yes, they're still happening, particularly in Bahrain, which I had guessed was one of the countries that the Iranians were referring to when they told me that.

52:21Ryan Grim:It's the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet and is one of the main countries whose infrastructure is being used to launch these attacks from both its coastal waters and its territory. And you do still see some strikes happening. But my sense from speaking to Iranian officials is that they feel that they've sent a message, that they've softened it, that they're going to require the U.S. to replenish its interceptors. In fact, we saw images yesterday of the U.S. actually moving some of its defensive missile capacity away from South Korea to try to transfer it to the Middle East to try to make up for the damage that the Iranians had done.

52:57Ryan Grim:I think also there is a propaganda component to this in the information war, which is that I think that these Gulf states that have cozied up to Trump, that have lucrative business deals with the Trump family, including Jared Kushner, I think they were totally and completely shocked by what happened. I think they knew there were going to be attacks, I think that they had dramatically underestimated the capacity of Iran to just cause panic and terror to rip through their societies. And they're watching as the United States has effectively just allowed it to happen while pouring and emergency rushing as many interceptors and other defensive missile capacity to Israel as possible.

53:37Ryan Grim:There is, I understand, backdoor diplomacy going on between these Gulf countries and Iran. You know, Pete Hegseth said something yesterday that I've heard from officials in some of these Gulf countries just caused, you know, fury, which is he said that Gulf countries far from running away from this are now going on the offensive. And he said, and they're giving us access rights and overflight rights. This was from the beginning, even before February 28th and the start of this, all these countries were yelling to anyone who would listen, no access rights, no use of our territory, no overflight, no use of our airspace.

54:14Ryan Grim:And then Pete Hanks sat yesterday is boasting and he says, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Iran's actions in the region have caused them to go to our side. This is the total opposite of the messaging coming from the Gulf. Yes, the Gulf states are portraying Iran as the aggressor, and they're saying almost nothing whatsoever critical of the United States or Israel. That's becoming a problem among their domestic population. And so if Iran is basically able to say to those countries, look, we understand that there was some civilian stuff that was hit, and we apologize for that. But overwhelmingly, we've been attacking the US military infrastructure in your country.

54:50I think the Iranians are calculating that the public relations component

54:54Ryan Grim:of this, the killing of civilians, the idea that you're serving Zionism by supporting this in Arab Muslim countries, that they're going to sort of be able to drive the wedge that the US and Israel thought they were succeeding in driving at the beginning of this. That's what I think is the strategy in part.

55:10Emily Jashinsky:I want to get your reaction to some updates here, Jeremy. We can put this next piece of video up on the screen. This is C3. IDF says it eliminated Hezbollah commander in an airstrike on the town in southern Lebanon. And he had already taken command after his predecessor was killed in 2024, according to the military. This is what open source Intel posted on X. Also, we have video here that DropSite posted. This is from the Iranian side. This is our next element we can put up on the screen. This is video released by Iranian media of missiles being launched during the 36th wave of Operation True Promise 4.

55:52Emily Jashinsky:DropSite writes, Iran once again warned that U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iranian infrastructure and civilians, quote, will not go unanswered. Now their days and nights are limited to siren sounds, fleeing, and shelters. We will not let them go. So Jeremy, all of this in what roughly the last 24 hours, what does this tell us about as we're starting to see chatter from Republicans about just, you know, going on the ship, doing the mission accomplished banner, more like an Arrested Development sketch, actually, but they're ready to do it. What does that all tell us about the plausibility or their ability to sell that to the public.

56:29Ryan Grim:Yeah, I mean, this is quite rapidly becoming a quagmire for Trump on multiple fronts. But also, Emily, remember, Israel assassinated the Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. They did the pager bomb plot. Since the November 2024 so-called ceasefire, Israel has just continued to bomb Lebanon and claiming that they're even further degrading Hezbollah's capacity. I mean, Israel and the United States basically said that Hezbollah was largely incapacitated and massively damaged. When Hezbollah last week entered this war, Israel was completely caught off guard by how ferocious the attacks were and how intact Hezbollah's military capacity actually seems to be.

57:13Ryan Grim:In some ways, Hezbollah's entry into this is the wild card because they have the high ground. They've already inflicted casualties on the Israelis. They are repelling attempted Israeli invasions right now. It's becoming a very serious problem. Israel has had to evacuate settlers and other Israelis from the northern border with Lebanon. It's becoming a very real problem. And Iran saying, you know, we have 10 times the targets. What Iran has said from the beginning is that they're going to respond proportionately, meaning that if their civilian infrastructure starts to get targeted by the U.S. and Israel, then they're going to go after the similar infrastructure in the region.

57:52Ryan Grim:There's been talk of them also going after tech companies that are servicing this war like Google and others and some of their outposts in the region. And so, you know, we've seen desalination plants hit in Iranian territory, the Iranians then responding in kind. You could see a massive expansion of this. And if the war drags on and Iran continues to show that it's not just sort of propaganda, their claims about their enduring capacity, it's going to tilt very heavily in favor of the smaller side. It's ultimately what caused the U.S. to withdraw from Afghanistan. It's why the United States militarily lost the Vietnam War.

58:30Ryan Grim:It's also to an extent why the U.S. had to leave Iraq, which is that if you're fighting insurgents in a guerrilla war and it goes on, it becomes a war of attrition. And your own population starts to see body bags and tin coffins coming home and economic impact starts hitting ordinary Americans at the pump, at the grocery store. And then all of your friends, and in the case of Trump, including those that are linked up with your son-in-law's business and other family business stuff, if they start saying you are ruining the entire project, they're in big trouble. And so then that's why the Iranians say this doesn't end on Trump's terms.

59:04Ryan Grim:It ends on ours. And the Iranians are obsessed with this idea. We will not allow them to think that they can end this without a clear guarantee that they don't believe they can keep doing this every four months. And the only way the Iranians believe they can do that is by sending a message to the region and to Americans, ordinary Americans, that when you do this, everything becomes miserable and more expensive for you.

59:27Saagar Enjeti:So from your conversations with them, have they made any attempts to kind of define what that looks like? Or is it more of a we'll know it when we see it? Like, how do they how do Iranian officials assess that Israel and the US governments have paid a sufficient cost such that they will not want to pay it easily again?

59:50Ryan Grim:You know, it's interesting because I have talked about this. And, you know, at the very beginning of it, there was a lot of disdain for the role of the United Nations. And they pointed to, this is Iranian officials, and they pointed to what happened with Trump's so-called Board of Peace in Gaza and saying that, you know, there is no actual international guarantor of all of this. In recent days, I've been starting to hear Iranian officials talk more about a United Nations Security Council process and other international guarantees. You know, China also doesn't like this. Trump's going to schedule to go to China soon.

1:00:26Ryan Grim:Russia, of course, is certainly assisting Iran with intelligence and maybe in other ways as well. I think the Iranians don't want to replay what they saw as the Gaza scenario where Trump creates this sort of fictitious path and it allows a colonial agenda to remain in place. So I don't think that there's any reasonable guarantee in a world where the U.S. is acting as it is under Trump, where the Iranians can say this agreement is worth something. I think what they're more looking at is inflicting enough pain and damage so that that is the motivating factor to any political framework that they will want to also include long-term guarantees and a long-term established internationally certified agreement.

1:01:07Ryan Grim:But they're not going to accept the ceasefire like they did in the so-called 12-day war in June, which, by the way, U.S. and Israel asked for, not Iran.

1:01:14Saagar Enjeti:All right. Well, interesting stuff. And again, Jeremy, your reporting has been so helpful throughout this. If you really wanted to know what Iranian officials were thinking, which you would think if you're an American war planner, you would want to know that. You'd be wrong, but it would be a fair assumption that you'd want to know what the other side is thinking. Your reporting would be the place to find it. Dropsitenews.com is where you can find the latest piece. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, guys.

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