3/4/26: Trump Panics After Israel Blamed For Iran War, US Pushes Iran Civil War, Spain Rebukes Trump, Gas Prices Soar

9:49Emily Jashinsky:Even though the Saudis were pushing the Iran strikes.

9:54Dave Weigel:And we can talk about that, too, with Maz. That was a Washington Post report that everybody is dismissing as not credible. So the Post reported that MBS multiple times pressed Trump to attack Iran, even though publicly he was saying don't do it. some reporting that i've done on this it seems like what happened is that lindsey graham went to saudi arabia uh in at the end of last month yeah met with mbs and publicly said like he made the set made the sell uh to mbs i think that what happened then is graham came back and told trump told the the crown prince wants you to do it but the crown prince never told graham that Graham just told Trump that.

10:44Dave Weigel:And then Trump told other people that, who then told the Washington Post that.

10:49Emily Jashinsky:That wouldn't be surprising.

10:50Dave Weigel:Saudi Arabia is saying we absolutely did not say this.

10:52Emily Jashinsky:That wouldn't be surprising at all, if that's what happened.

10:54Dave Weigel:No, because this could wind up with their oil fields on fire.

10:56Emily Jashinsky:Lindsey Graham playing telephone with everyone. He's been all over the press.

10:59Dave Weigel:A very malevolent, deliberate game of telephone.

11:03Emily Jashinsky:Incredible. Let's actually listen to Trump himself, who was pushed yesterday in the Oval Office about comments that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, not just Marco Rubio, though, Mike Johnson also had made on Capitol Hill the day before talking about how the immediate, and Sagar and Crystal covered this yesterday, the immediate precipitating factors that we knew, we got intelligence that Israel was going to strike. So we had to join preemptive action. Otherwise, we would have been behind the eight ball and he would have, Rubio said, you guys would have been doing hearings about why we didn't join with Israel in this attack.

11:41Emily Jashinsky:Now, Rubio said we had to do it anyway, and Johnson has said stuff to that effect as well. But they did say the immediate precipitating factor. It almost sounded like COPE. It almost sounded like they were trying to scapegoat Israel for forcing their hand while also trying to own the attack. So here's how Donald Trump responded to comments, A3.

12:00David Sirota:Did Israel force your hand to launch these strikes against Iran? Did that help pull the United States into this war?

12:07Krystal Ball:No, I might have forced their hands. You see, we were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. They were going to attack if we didn't do it. Based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were going to attack first, and I didn't want that to happen. So if anything, I might have forced Israel's hand, but Israel was ready, and we were ready, and we've had a very, very powerful impact.

12:36Ryan Grim:What's the worst case scenario that you have planned for in Iran?

12:41Krystal Ball:Well, I don't know if there's a worst case. We have them very much beaten militarily from the military standpoint. They're still lobbing some missiles at some point. They won't even be able to do that. I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who's as bad as the previous person. Right. That could happen. We don't want that to happen. It would probably be the worst. you go through this and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who was no better.

13:09Emily Jashinsky:Just very casually. It could get worse. The government could be worse.

13:13Dave Weigel:So a lot of Democrats emerged from a classified briefing yesterday on the Hill and all of them said, I went in concerned about this. I came out frightened. They have no plan. They can't even, in a classified setting, keep their own stories consistent from the beginning to the end. And if you see Trump talking there, he clearly does not have, he has not spent much time thinking this through.

13:38Emily Jashinsky:The messaging through.

13:39Dave Weigel:Right. The idea, not forget the messaging. Like why, like what happened? Like why he attacked and what the, and what the goal of the attack is going to be. He said, we're negotiating with these lunatics. No, Iran was negotiating with lunatics. Okay. Trump was, Trump was negotiating with Iran. The Omani foreign minister.

13:58Emily Jashinsky:I think he was also negotiating with lunatics.

14:00Dave Weigel:Well, maybe they're all lunatics. The Omani foreign minister, the lunatics who turned out to be correct. Sometimes you can be paranoid and correct.

14:08Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, that is.

14:08Dave Weigel:Yes, that's many such cases. The Omani foreign minister went on air and said, and he said, here's what they're offering. No enrichment, no stockpiling, open to talking about ballistic missiles, but you want to promise first that you're not going to attack. He, because he sensed that Kushner and, um, just either didn't understand or weren't being serious about receiving the offer. He went on TV and like told the entire world public what was, what was on offer for Trump to say, oh, they were actually about to attack. It just doesn't, uh, pass the Smith, uh, the smell test, sniff test.

14:48Emily Jashinsky:No, it's not what anybody, and it's also not what anybody's saying. It's not what the intelligence is saying. Like it is, Marco Rubio wasn't saying that.

14:53Dave Weigel:He's alone making that case.

14:54Emily Jashinsky:No, Marco Rubio was saying they would have gotten past the point of immunity very soon, meaning it would have been much harder to take out. This is Rubio's argument. It would have been much harder to take out the military capacity to degrade it. Because you're going to have so many drones. Exactly. And so that's not even...

15:08Dave Weigel:How does this even do anything about that?

15:10Emily Jashinsky:Well, yeah. And on what timetable, right? So is this going to... Are you able to degrade their military to the point where, I mean, when we were talking about their nuclear capacity being obliterated in June, that was a 10-year timetable, allegedly. They've been set back a decade. They can rebuild missiles quickly. You can't get rid of their ability to make missiles. They know how to do it. They have the knowledge. And get the drones from China.

15:32Dave Weigel:They're pretty cheap.

15:33Emily Jashinsky:So are we going to be right back here in a year, in five years? Because fundamentally, it is an ideology. There is a, I mean, since the IRGC in the last 10 plus years has particularly been emphasizing this idea that there's an eschatological element to Israel's existence. That if you get rid of Israel, you can bring in the, like, there are, of course, some far-right Israelis who think that. There are some dispensationalist Christian evangelicals who think that too. But that is also something you can't eradicate with bombs in Iran.

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16:56David Sirota:That is IVIMHealth.com. Subscription required, medication, labs, and supplements not included. Results based on patients who completed the full IV protocol over 68 weeks. Individual results may vary. Not all patients are eligible. Prescription medication may carry risks and should be used only as directed by your provider.

17:19Saagar Enjeti:Santana, Oneness Tour 2026. The power, the energy. Come celebrate your favorite hits from Woodstock to Supernatural and beyond with very special guest, the Doobie Brothers.

17:34Saagar Enjeti:Get tickets now at LiveNation.com.

17:42Saagar Enjeti:Santana and Doobie Brothers, Oneness Tour 2026. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20 % year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the S &P 500.

18:19Saagar Enjeti:Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA, and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice.

18:47Saagar Enjeti:Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

18:52Dave Weigel:Rubio's claim that the reason that the U.S. attacked now is because Israel was going to attack and we were going to be attacked as a result of that. So we had to attack like that was the claim that he made. It's one of the most consequential public emissions made in decades. I would imagine that the Israelis are absolutely livid that he said that publicly. And so Rubio is now doing a tiny bit of cleanup around that. So let's let's see how he's kind of finessing this with a four.

19:23Ryan Grim:Yesterday, you told us that Israel was going to strike Iran and that that's why we needed to get involved today. The president said that Iran was going to get. Yeah, your statement is false. So that's not what I was asked very specifically. Were you there yesterday? Yes. OK. Okay. Were you the one that—because somebody asked me a question yesterday. Did we go in because of Israel? And I said—you asked me that. You follow up. And I said, no. I told you this had to happen anyway. The president made a decision, and the decision he made was that Iran was not going to be allowed to hide behind its ballistic missile program, that Iran was not going to be allowed to hide behind its ability to conduct these attacks.

19:57Ryan Grim:That decision had been made. The president systematically—made a decision to systematically destroy this terroristic capability that they had, and we carried that out. I was very clear on that answer. This was a question of timing, of why this had to happen as a joint operation, not the question of the intent. Once the president made a decision that negotiations were not going to work, that they were playing us on the negotiations, and that this was a threat that was untenable, the decision was made to strike them. That's what I said yesterday, and you guys need to play it. If you're going to play these statements, you need to play the whole statement, not clip it to reach a narrative that you want to do, all right?

20:27Ryan Grim:Is there a plan in place to evacuate Americans before the attack took place? Well, that's the plan we're trying to carry out. The problem is, or the challenge we are facing, is airspace closures. If a country closes their airport, for example, in some cases, the airports have been hit. So the airport in Kuwait was hit. So if an airport's been attacked or the airspace is closed, then we can have the planes lined up to go, but we can't get them to land because we don't have the permissions to land there. So that's the challenge. It's going to take a little time because we don't control the airspace closures.

20:56Ryan Grim:That said, there may be more people out there that need help. We need to know who you are. So please, I'm asking the media, publicize the phone numbers and the website because we need people to call in so we have their name, we have their contact information, we have their location and their request.

21:10Dave Weigel:The context there is that there are thousands of Americans who want to be evacuated from this war zone. If you put the two pieces together, Rubio is effectively saying that because of the timing of when this happened, which was driven by Israel, that he can't get these Americans evacuated. at this point. So Senator Tom Cotton was also trying to clean this up a little bit, but just ended up reiterating the point. Let's do a five.

21:42Ryan Grim:Israel faced an existential risk, and they were prepared to strike Iran alone. If that happened, Iran was very likely to target our troops. That may address the question of why now? Why not two weeks ago? Why not two months from now? The president, though, did not want to put our troops in harm's way. The more fundamental question, though, is why? Why did we have to carry out this operation against Iran? And as I said, that's because they have a vast missile

22:10Murtaza Hussain:arsenal that far exceeds our combined missile defenses, and it gets worse every single month.

22:15Dave Weigel:That is an unacceptable threat to the United States. So, Emily, so we were going to do it anyway at some point in the next maybe few months, even though we were pretending to do these negotiations. But Israel just decided to do it, And so we went with them.

22:29Emily Jashinsky:And Trump also maybe forced their hand. Trump forced their hand.

22:33Dave Weigel:Yes. Israel, the, you know, the peacemaker in the Middle East absolutely did not want to attack Iran for sure. Even though Netanyahu put out this like gloating video saying like, I have been yearning for this attack on Iran for 40 years now, 40 years ago, by the way, as you know, Israel and the United States were arming Iran.

22:56Emily Jashinsky:Oh, yeah.

22:56Dave Weigel:So the yearn to attack Iran was happening at the same time that we were literally sending weapons to Iran. So setting all that aside, would you move to the classified briefing or any thoughts on how this like incredibly historic admission on the part of Rubio and Johnson and others is going to factor in politically, especially if and as this becomes a complete economic catastrophe and also American lives and thousands of other people's lives get lost as a result of it.

23:32Emily Jashinsky:I mean, I think that's a great place to go next because this is what Democratic senators were saying after emerging from the briefings that Marco Rubio was on Capitol Hill to do. And I think you're totally right also to pick up that the emergent narrative seems to be we were going to do it anyway. We had to do it now. Like that's what they don't, they clearly don't want to say that because it's been, they've seen how it's played. That's why you saw Rubio rolling out there frustrated yesterday saying, play the whole clip, play the whole clip. And I said, well, you said that. You literally said that the precipitating factor was because our intelligence said Israel was going to do something.

24:09Emily Jashinsky:We knew Israel was going to do the strike. So, yes, play the whole clip. Great. Happy to have this broader picture understanding. Sure, it was the whole clip. But you're also, even when you're doing the broader picture understanding, reiterating exactly what everybody actually took issue with, which was that Israel forced our hand and the president of the United States is saying something different. We have kids from Minnesota coming back in boxes. That's a disaster. That's a disaster. It is a moral disaster. It's a disaster for the administration. The messaging has been atrocious. And I think it's because it reflects the strategy is muddled to begin with.

24:44Emily Jashinsky:you could hear that in Trump's comments, the point that you made, Ryan, where he's like, well, I don't know what comes next. Maybe it'll be worse. I hope it's not worse. Maybe it'll be worse. Could be worse. So here's Dick Blumenthal, the senator from Connecticut, walking out of the briefing yesterday. Ryan, would it be fair to characterize him as somebody who's, let's say, hawkish on Israel, supportive of Israel? Oh, absolutely. Yes. Here we go. Let's roll it.

25:05Ryan Grim:I just want to say I am more fearful than ever after this briefing that we may be putting boots on the ground and that troops from the United States may be necessary to accomplish objectives that the administration seems to have. But I also am no more clear on what the priorities are going to be of the administration going forward, whether it is destroying the nuclear capacity of Iran or simply the missiles or regime change or stopping terrorist activities. And I think the administration owes it to the American people to have briefings, not just for members of Congress, but for the American public.

25:55Ryan Grim:Nothing here should have been classified. It should be available to the American people.

26:01Emily Jashinsky:Let's roll another hawk. Chuck Schumer walking out of the meeting. This is A7.

26:06Ryan Grim:Do you think Israel, you know, forced the U.S.'s hand here, boxed the U.S. in on this? Look, no one wants a nuclear war. No one wants a nuclear Israel. But we certainly don't want an endless war, plain and simple.

26:22Ryan Grim:What did I say? Oh, no. Got it. Let me say that again. No one wants an endless war, but we certainly don't want a nuclear Iran. That's for sure. Okay.

26:34Emily Jashinsky:Listening audience, what you missed was Chuck Schumer started to walk away after he said nobody wants a nuclear Israel. Reporters were like, wait, wait, wait. So he goes back to the camera and says, let me do another take. Let me say that again and corrects himself to say nuclear Iran.

26:48Dave Weigel:And Israel, for context, has nuclear weapons but pretends that they don't. And it's this bizarre decades-long situation where journalists and policymakers are supposed to sort of pretend like they don't know that they do, even though they absolutely do. and have tested them and worked with the apartheid South Africa on helping them develop one. It's like, I wouldn't say nobody wants a nuclear Israel. Israel does. But other than that, yeah.

27:15Emily Jashinsky:Well, so these are two, I think if people are listening, they've identified two different layers of muddled messaging. That's a way too charitable term of mixed messaging, of contradictory messaging, which is, is it nukes or missiles? And was it Israel or was it our decision? and that moment. Did we do it at that moment on our own or because we knew Israel was going to strike? And there's been contradictory and mixed message on both of those layers. And those are predicate level questions, foundational questions about this new war. Is it even a war? The president said war in his speech. So of course, yes, it's a war.

27:53Emily Jashinsky:But then you have Mark Wayne Mullen, for example. Also, he was standing right where Chuck Schumer was standing in the video we just played, say, this is a war. A reporter said, you know, you just said that it's a war. And he did a Schumer and said, I need to correct myself. I misspoke. That was a misspoke. What is it?

28:10Dave Weigel:It's a combat operation? They're saying major combat operation. Defensive combat operation?

28:15Emily Jashinsky:Preemptive, yes. Proactive.

28:18Dave Weigel:And Schumer can't get out of his own way and become a real opposition figure because of his hostility to Iran rooted in his decades-long support for Israel. if you noticed in that clip, he leads with nobody wants a nuclear Iran rather than what is kind of more pressing at the moment, the massive war that might spiral into World War III. He punts. And also, I thought this was obliterated last June. And also, they were at the table offering to have no stockpiling. So today, there will be a war powers resolution vote in the Senate. It looks like John Fetterman will join Republicans. Graham Plattner has been pushing Susan Collins very hard on this, pushing her to condemn this, to turn her concerns into actions and join Democrats in opposing this.

29:13Dave Weigel:You might know better than me. I don't think she's going to do that. We'll see how she ends up voting. If I were her, I would just throw – her vote is not going to be decisive. I think it's going to lose. You've got 53 Republicans plus Fetterman, right? So they can lose a couple of Republicans and still defeat the War Powers Resolution. So if I'm Susan Collins, I would just take a cynical vote and vote for the War Powers Resolution. I don't think she really will, though. What do you think?

29:43Emily Jashinsky:Well, yeah, I mean, it depends on whatever agreement is happening behind closed doors with Trump world, National Republican Senatorial Committee world. And whatever they think is smarter for her. Well, and also if Donald Trump is going to be sensitive about people voting against him or if they can.

30:01Dave Weigel:Oh, then if he starts attacking her. And you lose money. Lose money and lose hardcore MAGA votes. So then, yeah.

30:08Emily Jashinsky:Otherwise, if you telegraph, you're taking a cynical vote.

30:11Dave Weigel:So she'll go with the war. Or if you're taking a cynical process vote, maybe you can alleviate that and you can work on that again behind closed doors.

30:20Emily Jashinsky:But one of the big takeaways from what you just said, actually, is that Plattner's already moved on to Susan Collins, which I think is hilarious. It's like Janet Mills yesterday's news. Primaries over moving on to Susan Collins. But he really is.

30:31Dave Weigel:If people don't live on Twitter, there was a two or three day hissy fit where a whole bunch of like establishment Democrats all in unison telling Graham Plattner to drop out. It was like the funniest thing. It's like, I'm sorry, what? Are you looking for the manager? It's a primary. They're going to vote. It was so undignified and so embarrassing. And then it just like faded.

30:58Emily Jashinsky:Well, let's finish here with this clip of Lindsey Graham. Get a little bit from the right. We're going to splice up here Lindsey Graham and Tim Burchett. So Republican member of the House, Freedom Caucus guy. You've probably seen Burchett around. But here's Graham and then Burchett. It's worth watching these both back to back.

31:15Ryan Grim:So I'm calling on President Trump today. Join Israel to attack Hezbollah. Avenge the Marines. America never forgets. Those 220 Marines and 18 sailors' families, we want to go after the infrastructure that killed your loved ones. Their IRGC assets in Beirut as I speak. President Trump come up with a new operation called Semper Fi, fly with Israel and go after Hezbollah who has American blood on its hands, not only take the mothership of Iran down, also take the proxy of Hezbollah, settle the score, even the account. Lindsey hasn't seen a fist fight. He hasn't wanted to turn into a bombing, right?

32:00Ryan Grim:So I just take it with a grain of salt.

32:02Emily Jashinsky:Take it with a grain of salt.

32:03Dave Weigel:As a Republican, if you can gauge from the accent.

32:06Emily Jashinsky:Yeah. Well, he also said, he said to a reporter in that same press conference, we do expect the public to hold us accountable as the war goes on. And you should hold us accountable. He's a Freedom Caucus guy, so he's not like your average establishment person and obviously feels heat from corners of the base that are uncomfortable with this. Now, what I can tell so far, vibes on the right, very supportive. There are a couple of skeptical, high-profile voices. But I think Republican voters are very supportive of what's happened. So I think maybe there's probably more skepticism and criticism on the online right than there is the offline or the partially online right.

32:44Emily Jashinsky:So I don't know how much heat people are going to be feeling. But if it goes on longer, you know, Burchett's going to hear from people who feel like Marjorie Taylor Greene in his own district. Probably already is hearing from a decent chunk of people. I mean, even if it's 20, 30 percent of the Republican base, that's a lot. And it'll grow as this continues.

33:02Dave Weigel:And just to be clear there, Lindsey Graham was saying that the U.S. should bomb Lebanon to avenge a 1983 bombing, which took place before I would assume most people in Hezbollah were born, including my esteemed co-hosts.

33:17Emily Jashinsky:That's right. Yes. A decade. Me and those Hezbollah guys. 90s kids.

33:23Dave Weigel:90s kids. All right. Up next, Drop Sites Pertaz, who's saying is going to walk us through some more of this, including U.S. signaling that they're going to try to start a civil war in Iran by arming Kurdish proxies.

33:58David Sirota:medicine. 99.2 % of patients who've completed the IVM weight loss protocol achieved meaningful change, dropping an average of 45 pounds. IVM built for your wellness journey. IVM built for real life. When you sign up right now, you can get a one month free trial. Start your personalized plan in minutes by visiting IVIMHealth.com. That is IVIMHealth.com. Subscription required, medication, labs, and supplements not included. Results based on patients who completed the full IVIM protocol over 68 weeks. Individual results may vary. Not all patients are eligible. Prescription medication may carry risks and should be used only as directed by your provider.

34:49Saagar Enjeti:Santana, Oneness Tour 2026. The power, the energy. Come celebrate your favorite hits from Woodstock to Supernatural and beyond with very special guest, the Doobie Brothers.

35:04Saagar Enjeti:Get tickets now at LiveNation.com.

35:11Saagar Enjeti:Santana and Doobie Brothers, Oneness Tour 2026. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20 % year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the S &P 500.

35:49Saagar Enjeti:Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA, and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice.

36:16Saagar Enjeti:Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

36:20Dave Weigel:The Trump administration is signaling that it plans to arm Kurdish proxies to start an uprising in Iran, which is actually kind of an unusual thing to telegraph publicly if you're going to try to keep it clandestine. So we're going to talk about where that comes from and what that means in a moment with my dropside colleague, Murtaza Hussain. But first, we have a one-month free premium offer that we're doling out to everybody so that you can get coverage of this war without having to pay for it. Go to breakingpoints.com. It's BP326. And in post, we can add a little map here because I think it's important here.

37:01Dave Weigel:When Sykes-Picot drew the lines of the Middle East, they took the Kurdish region, the Kurdish population, and split it basically right down the middle. They put a quarter of it over in Turkey. So there's a large Kurdish population in eastern Turkey. There's then a large Kurdish population in northeast Syria. Then there's a large Kurdish population over in northern Iraq. And then you have a smaller but non-trivial Kurdish population in Iran. And so it is the Iranian Kurds that are now the focus of U.S. attention and affection and weapons supplies hoping to further destabilize Iran. So, Amaz, thank you so much for joining us this morning.

37:50Dave Weigel:Very much appreciate it. And we can put up, what do we have, B2 here. This is from CNN. This is the U.S. intelligence officials signaling that they plan to spark an uprising in Iran, which obviously has some level of PSYOP, psychological operation to it. because the CIA is also capable of sparking uprisings without telling CNN that they're about to spark an uprising. And if we had the map still up there, we could point out that down in the southern part of Iran, there's a large Balok population. There's a Balok population in neighboring Pakistan, which has all sorts of kind of intelligence connections and also their own kind of drive for independence or autonomy.

38:45Dave Weigel:So there's a lot of concern that the southern area as well could become a place for some sort of uprising. So what do we know so far about the kind of Trump outreach to the Iraqi Kurds and whether or not the Kurds see this as in their interest?

39:03Murtaza Hussain:Yeah, so right as you pointed out, the Kurds have been a stateless population or a state population without their own state, for their ethnicity at least, since Saïd Foucault. They're spread out among a few different countries, countries of which they are citizens, but they don't have a Kurdistan of their own per se. And so, you know, there's always been this tension with these states and so forth about how Kurds will fit in. And now I think this report, you know, there's been militancy and there's been political movements in Iran and Kurdistan for a long time. But I think that this report is very fascinating because as you said, it's very strange to telegraph so loudly that you're about to do this imminently.

39:41Murtaza Hussain:I think some of the reports said an offensive could start in a few days. That's a very strange thing to identify in that way. But that said, there have been reports that the U.S. made intelligence contacts with the PJAK, which is like the Iranian branch of the PKK, effectively, in Iran. Also reports of weapons transfers and so forth. So I don't find it completely beyond the pale. I don't have to find it completely outlandish and they could be doing this. But I think it's very clear that if they were to do this, it would not be to really help the Kurds per se. It would be kind of an inversion of the Iraq war situation where the U.S.

40:16Murtaza Hussain:basically accidentally started a civil war by creating a security dilemma. In this case, it seems like they're deliberately trying to start a civil war and maybe try to drain the attention and resources already stretched of the Iranian military. They may impose a no-fly zone over this part of Iran to try to break the territorial integrity of Iran in that sense. And I think those are all things that are very plausible. The one thing is if you talk to Iranians, they're very divided and polarized about many different things in a true kind way. One thing that really reunites them is the territorial integrity of Iran.

40:45Murtaza Hussain:They're very patriotic across political divisions. So I think that one byproduct of this, it may actually make people rally around the country and the flag or even the government, because it's the nightmare scenario of pretty much every Iranian. And even the most Shah, Khalid, supporting Iranians is militant about the subject. They don't accept it. So, you know, it's not to say it won't happen and they're not going to try it. But, you know, I'll say one more thing. It would also require much more U.S. involvement. It's not just like passing it off to the Kurds and walking away. privately tremendous U.S.

41:16Murtaza Hussain:special forces presence in Iran, ongoing, as I said, air cover for these troops, these Kurdish forces to protect them and so forth. And I do think we're heading down the road, if we're doing this, much greater U.S. involvement, including ground involvement in Iran.

41:32Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, on that point, actually, Ryan highlighted this clip of a Kurdish imam that we can put it up on the screen that said to Pallavi, quote, let me make this clear. When your dictator father executed Qazi Muhammad. There was only one Qazi Muhammad, but now millions of Qazi exist in Kurdistan. We promise we will not allow you to enter any part of Kurdistan in Iran. Maz, what do you make of that? What does that tell us? What more does that tell us about the dynamics you were just laying out?

42:01Murtaza Hussain:Well, one thing to keep in mind is that Iran is an ethnically heterogeneous country. I think maybe like half or 60 % of people are Persian background, but there's a huge population of people with Turkish background, Kurds, Baloch, and so forth, even smaller ethnicities throughout the country as well. And Resul Palavi really speaks to the Persian segment of the population, the more urban, you know, plurality or slim majority of the country. But there's a very big country. It's a country with 90 million people. And these people, many of them did not have a very happy experience with the previous Shah.

42:37Murtaza Hussain:And they view the imposition of another pile of B as a return to like a straightforward Persian ethnic chauvinism in their view, so that they would not view that as a liberation at all for the vast majority of them. The current government is very polarizing and probably has a supportive segment of the population and not the majority. But in theory, it's sort of intended to represent the entire country. It's not an ethnic party per se. It's a national party, national government. So I think that introducing, I don't think that even really people are thinking about these dynamics and thinking about sending the Shah back.

43:12Murtaza Hussain:It's a very romantic idea, just mail the king back to the country. Monarchic restorations have a history in Europe in the past as well, too. But it's a very, very complex situation. And as many U.S. officials, many foreign officials have said, have spoken with the U.S. counterparts, it doesn't seem like it's a plan per se. And I do get the impression that Reza Pahlavi is more of the Israelis guy than the Americans, because he's much more closely embraced by Netanyahu than he has been by the U.S., which has kept him, at least in public, at arm's length.

43:40Dave Weigel:Yeah, and Trump yesterday was asked about Reza Pallavi and pretty much dismissed him in a similar way to the way that Maria Machado seemed to be kind of dismissed by Trump. It's like, yeah, he seems like a nice guy, but I don't know if he's the one, there's some other people that he thinks could run a run. And to your point, the Shah restoration plan runs kind of in direct conflict and contradiction to this, like, we're going to spark armed uprisings all over the place because, you know, the Shah, the crown prince, whatever he calls himself, has been very clear that, you know, it's one Iran and he will be the king of all of Iran and then there'll be a democratic transition at some point in the future.

44:27Dave Weigel:But he's not tolerating separatist movements. His father executed people who pursued that similar line. So those are two strategies, as you said, that cannot work together. We were originally told by Trump that this was going to be a regime change war. It seems like they're starting to realize that it's not quite as simple as they thought. And as many people have pointed out, just changing the regime through an aerial bombardment campaign isn't quite possible. So it seems now, and this is what I wanted to ask you about, and we can roll B1 here while I'm asking this question. it seems like a kind of split the baby, split the country strategy is, okay, we can't do regime change.

45:17Dave Weigel:This is Tehran. These are images coming out of just apocalyptic scenes coming out of Tehran. Okay, we can't do regime change, but maybe we can do complete regime destruction, complete regime collapse, and make it so this country is just simply rendered a failed state, you know, dropped from the ranks of a struggling country under sanctions to one that more resembles Gaza. And that can be, and that can adopt the approach that the Israelis took to have taken to Gaza, which they call, you know, mowing the lawn, which would mean, you know, every six months or so they come in with a bombing campaign.

46:00Dave Weigel:As soon as a little bit of reconstruction gets going and life starts to get back. Normally you bomb them back to misery again. And so if you can have the Balok people rising up, if you're going to have the Kurds rising up in a constant bombardment of this, one of the oldest and most populated cities in the world, then maybe you can just destroy the regime. So what are you seeing just as a matter of strategy? What is being done to Tehran as we speak?

46:32Murtaza Hussain:Well, I think, Ryan, you hit the nail on the head. I think that they're not doing regime change per se. And if they were trying to hypothetically impose a neoliberal pro-Western government, maybe Reza Pahlavi to control all of Iran, that would be one of the more relatively benign outcomes, actually, or benign intentions, because you're trying to preserve something called Iran, even in a very bloody and brutal way. I don't think that's what they're trying to do here. I think they're trying to do regime destruction, regime dissolution. They would like to turn Iran into something like Iraq in the 1990s, where it had been heavily damaged.

47:05Murtaza Hussain:It was very poor and sanctioned. Sovereignty was basically irrelevant. You could bomb it any time you wanted, keep it on the back foot. And then one day, 10 years later, if the circumstances arose, you can go in there and knock it off, and people wouldn't really object to it at the time. The impression I get from listening to the Trump administration officials is that they considered the entire, the major mistake of the war on terror was not the killing and destruction, but it was the attempt to try to engineer something out of that. You know, I think it seems like the war on terror was like very progressive and woke or something.

47:36Murtaza Hussain:It was too involved in human rights and state building and stuff like that. What they would like to do, and they're pretty much open about this, they would like to destroy Iran in very extreme vulgar terms. They just described that, including Secretary Hexas today. So they, and they don't plan to rebuild it or they don't plan to put someone new in charge or someone new comes in who maybe supports the U.S., if not, no problem. And causing the dissolution of the country is something which is very harmful to countries around Iran. It's bad for Turkey or Pakistan or the Gulf Arab states and so forth.

48:09Murtaza Hussain:It could be very bad for Europe if there's a major refugee crisis, which I think Iran is a country of 90 million people. I think it would absolutely be a refugee crisis at that point. But the U.S. is far away. Even Israel is pretty far away. So they could probably weather the blows from that. And, you know, that's kind of, I think, the plan such as it is. Whether that will be successful or not, I don't know, because, you know, Iran is a very large, coherent, cohesive country. It wasn't really like Iraq or even Syria that was created by, you know, Saif's Pico colonial borders. It has, like, actual country with actual historic, civilizational sort of containment that it had.

48:46Murtaza Hussain:So I don't think it's that easy to destroy it. But that said, you know, you can do tremendous harm. You could kill tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people could be killed. It's not by any means off the, you know, out of the realm of possibility. I do think we're heading somewhere like that. So I think that that's unfortunately the trajectory. And, you know, the Iranian government could have options in how it responds if it manages to maintain power and so forth. But they're in for a very, very challenging period. And I think we're only, sadly, at the beginning of this.

49:14Emily Jashinsky:Well, let's roll this footage from Lebanon. This is B4, because actually, you know, we played a clip of Lindsey Graham at the Senate yesterday calling for Trump to join Israel, strike Hezbollah, you know, avenge the Marines. But everything you're just saying probably rings in many people's minds as what happened after Iraq, particularly what happened after Iraq with the rise of ISIS. And I guess that's my next question is where you were saying if you have this dispersed or you have this power vacuum, what could come next is not what anybody predicted when we went into Iraq. I mean, it's remarkable to look back on that and think of how little understanding there was of what could come next.

50:05Emily Jashinsky:But this seems utterly insane for the United States to be completely confident that what comes next is going to be potentially inevitably better than what was before, which is, again, sitting there saying over and over again. It couldn't possibly get worse. It couldn't possibly get worse. What could get worse, if anything, Maz?

50:26Murtaza Hussain:Well, you know, you could have, as I mentioned earlier, the refugee crisis. The refugee crisis was hugely destabilizing to Europe, had a tremendous impact on politics all over the world. That's very impossible. You have Iraq and Syria. Syria, they're only, you know, 20 million in the population and so forth. Iran is 90 million people. That's a tremendous number of people, even a fraction of whom may become refugees, who would wind up in Europe. That would simply change the politics of the continent again in less than a decade. So I think that's a very important possible consequence. But also, you know, Iran, there's a tremendous amount of knowledge and material militarily, nuclear stuff in there as well, too.

51:07Murtaza Hussain:You could have a breakdown of state authority. You could have different factions fighting over nuclear material, people trying to develop nuclear weapons outside of cohesive state structures. No one could see that. They could be cooperating with people outside the country. to incorporate people in Russia or elsewhere in the world to do this, to conceal these activities. The way Iran is right now, especially with the government trying to engage with the international community in various ways, there's a great duty of transparency that affords because you know where Iranian nuclear sites are, you know for the most part where their nuclear materials are.

51:41Murtaza Hussain:What if that whole structure breaks down? What if a small group of people, armed people in some organization go to the mountains, a very mountainous country, and develop a nuclear weapon up there, a dirty bomb or something like that. You know, a million nightmares could happen if you turn a gigantic country like that and do an apocalypse.

51:59Emily Jashinsky:And you're not bombing the, well, I was just going to say, because you know this very well, you're not bombing the, what's the right word, the theological persuasions or the ideological persuasions of some chunk of the Iranian population away. In fact, you could actually be radicalizing more and more people into IRGC-style ideologies. I mean, again, it's part of what happened with ISIS. You hear how ISIS was recruiting people. Some of these videos that are coming, I mean, what happened to the school in the first, what, 24 hours of the bombing? That's a recipe for another potential ISIS-like recruitment boon.

52:36Emily Jashinsky:It seems to me, at least, but you would know this better, Maz.

52:39Murtaza Hussain:Well, I think it might be likely to revivify a very hardline Iranian nationalism. of them maybe channel to the current government. That's a very significant possibility because the whole message of the government was that America is bad and America has pushed us around in the past. They did a coup in the 1950s, they did arms Saddam Hussein in the 80s. And a lot of people actually didn't really believe that anymore, younger people and so forth. And, you know, if you, however long this goes on, that violence naturally has a polarizing effect. People start to, you know, get radicalized by, as you said, they start to get noticing or they say it hurt, or their family members are in danger, change of their perception, then the government was not very popular before this.

53:19Murtaza Hussain:It was maybe 30%, 25%, something like that. People's back-of-the-envelope calculations at the level of support society. If you continue bombing them, you'll generate patriotic sentiments that they can challenge. So maybe the U.S. is indifferent to that. Maybe they're not trying to engineer a new Iran so they don't care. But that would strengthen the Iranian government, absolutely, because the one thing that would make it very easy to resist or easier to resist this onslaught or attempts to break up the country on an ethnic basis is to revivify support in the government. And the government would have to do things too.

53:52Murtaza Hussain:It would have to change the way it engages with people, maybe change some of its public messaging and the way it makes decisions, be more inclusive in that sense to a degree. But, you know, it's giving them an opportunity for that. I don't see necessarily like a wholly extreme ISIS-like movement emerging from Iran. I think that there was kind of like a unique constellation of factors in Iraq and Syria that resulted in that. But I do think that it would transform people's opinions in ways which could be politically adverse in the long term.

54:21Dave Weigel:And last question for me. What is Iran doing differently this time? They're clearly getting absolutely pummeled by Israel and the United States. The bombing campaign seems to be exceeding what was done during the 12-day war. But what is Iran doing differently when it comes to their response? And what is working for them and what's not working?

54:45Murtaza Hussain:Well, it seems like this time they're relying more on the short range or shorter range of one-way attack drones, the Shahid drones that they're firing at U.S. positions in the Gulf states and sometimes the targets in the Gulf states as well, too. That's been the predominant focus of their retaliation. So, you know, the interesting thing is that most of Iran's ballistic missile force is actually not developed to hit Israel. to develop to hit these targets in the Gulf. So, you know, they're using more of those. And obviously they're under much more fire this time to suppress these launchers, to destroy them before they can be fired and so forth.

55:17Murtaza Hussain:But still, as I said, it's a very big country. And around the Persian Gulf littoral area, they have caves, they have small launch sites and so forth. It's very difficult to get all of them. And they're doing regular stream of attacks on these targets. And there was actually a New York Times story about this and it was on social media as well too. but they're mapping out all the radars that the Iranians hit in the Gulf states. They've actually destroyed billions of dollars of U.S. equipment at these bases, and very sophisticated anti-ballistic missile radars and other radars and so forth. So they are actually hitting things which are mattered.

55:49Murtaza Hussain:They also hit a CIA station in Saudi Arabia. They hit embassies and so forth. So this is not a completely trivial response. But that said, you know, given the depletion of stockpiles in the last war, And also, this time, the fact that the U.S. is not just involved hitting Iran, but also giving fuel support to the Israelis so they can hit Iran more regularly, is difficult to maintain the large-level ballistic missile salvos that took place in the last war. This means that the U.S. and Israeli interceptors are probably depleting at a slower rate than before. But also, you know, they can't really hit these targets as hard as they did before.

56:26Murtaza Hussain:So I think from the Iranian perspective, they also may be trying to preserve their capacities, not to fire them all in the short term, but to fight a long war of attrition. Because if the U.S. and Israel can only fight for a few weeks at this capacity, but they can go for months and months and, you know, six months or something like that and keep firing, then the perception of who is really on top here may start to shift. And I think that's usually the strategy of the weaker party in a war. Many Iranian officials have said this. And I will say one last thing. It was seen as the biggest mistake that the Iranians made last year when they stopped firing after 12 days.

56:58Murtaza Hussain:Because in the Iranian system, they said we finally figured out how to get past the missile defenses. We shouldn't stop firing. But also, if the war is going to come next year anyways, now the Israelis in the back foot and the U.S. is not clearly going to get involved. We should just have it now. Press our advantage now rather than wait another year, which is what they did in the end.

57:15Dave Weigel:All right.

57:15Murtaza Hussain:All right.

57:16Dave Weigel:Well, Maz, stick around for a moment because we're going to talk about what the European response has been and what the U.S. response to the European response has been. So we'll stick around after the break for this.

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1:00:10Dave Weigel:So a diplomatic and trade war is breaking out between the United States and Spain over Spain's refusal to allow the United States to use its bases to attack Iran. Trump was asked about this and said that, you know what, maybe he'll just cut off Spain completely. Let's roll this.

1:00:27Krystal Ball:The right was given to us by the Supreme Court. And we have the right as an example, we talked about Spain. I could tomorrow stop or today even better, stop everything having to do with Spain, all business having to do with Spain, have the right to stop it. embargoes, do anything I want with it. And we may do that with Spain. But some of the European, like Spain, has been terrible. In fact, I told Scott to cut off all dealings with Spain. Spain, first of all, it started when every European nation, at my request, paid 5%, which they should be doing. And everybody was enthusiastic about it, Germany, everybody.

1:01:08Krystal Ball:And Spain didn't do it. And now Spain actually said that we can't use their bases. And that's all right. We could use their base if we want. We could just fly in and use it. Nobody's going to tell us not to use it, but we don't have to. But they were unfriendly. And so I told him we don't want to. Spain has absolutely nothing that we need other than great people. They have great people, but they don't have great leadership. And as you know, they were the only country that in NATO would not agree to go up to 5%. percent. I don't think they would agree to go up to anything. They wanted to keep it at two percent and they don't pay the two percent.

1:01:46Krystal Ball:So we're going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don't want anything to do with Spain. All right.

1:01:51Dave Weigel:So Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez pushed back against Trump, saying that he's not going to be bullied. Now, Trump is probably correct. They probably could just fly in. I don't think Spain's going to shoot the U.S. planes down. But Sanchez is saying that he's standing by it. We can put up his post here. He said, the world, Europe, and Spain have faced this critical moment before. In 2003, a few irresponsible leaders dragged us into an illegal war in the Middle East that brought nothing but insecurity and pain. Our response then must be our response now. No to violations of international law.

1:02:25Dave Weigel:No to the illusion that we can solve the world's problems with bombs, no to repeating the mistakes of the past, no to war. Emily, how are people feeling about this on the right? Just Trump kind of decided that we're going to go to war and decided the entire world has to go to war with us, and now we're going to cut off Spain? Like, what does that mean?

1:02:53Emily Jashinsky:It's Trump. It's just it's Trump's tactics that people have become accustomed to. And I think some people on the right actually, frankly, enjoy Trump coming in. It's like people see it almost as Reagan coming in after Carter malaise as it's kind of remembered in the American imagination and saying it's morning in America again. And, you know, Trump is a much darker version of that saying it's America's morning again. Like, we're the ones who are in charge or in control. And you have to deal with it. We're actually wrangling the world. This is our right. We have the power. And you're not going to tell us no.

1:03:31Emily Jashinsky:So let's put C2 up on the screen. This is Poland saying they will now work on getting their own nuclear weapons. We have France that we can put up on the screen as well. This is from the New York Times headline, Macron expands French nuclear arsenal and vows protection for neighbors. This is all what's transpired in less than a week. And I want to roll also Mark Carney, sort of the, what's the right word, arch nemesis of Trump, ostensibly. Here's what he said. We can roll the SOT.

1:04:06Ryan Grim:We support efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security, because Canada is taking the world as it is, not passively waiting for a world we wish to be. We do, however, take this position with regret because the current conflict is another example of the failure of the international order. Despite decades of UN Security Council resolutions, the tireless work of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the succession of sanctions and diplomatic frameworks, Iran's nuclear threat remains. And now the United States and Israel have acted without engaging the United Nations or consulting allies, including Canada.

1:04:57Ryan Grim:So where to from here? With a rapidly spreading conflict and growing threats to civilian life. Canada reaffirms that international law binds all belligerents. We condemn the strikes carried out by Iran on civilians and civilian infrastructure across the Middle East. And we implore all parties, including the United States and Israel, to respect the rules of international engagement. Canada calls for a rapid de-escalation of hostilities and is prepared to assist in achieving this goal.

1:05:29Emily Jashinsky:Well, to your question, Ryan, this is how Trump world sees it. Like, okay, nerd international relations. This is real politic. Donald Trump has brought this transparent, naked, real politic back to the White House, where it always was. This was always a pretext used to weaken the nation state and particularly the United States to undermine U.S. hegemony by people who want to control the world out of Davos and Brussels, as opposed to letting countries thrive or fail on their own might and power. And I think that's how, like, if we were trying to flesh out the meat on the bones, That's how people would say they're interpreting it.

1:06:08Emily Jashinsky:They're not particularly concerned about losing support of allies, to be honest.

1:06:14Dave Weigel:Yeah, and Mark Carney is a particularly good example because he gave this like famous speech at Davos where he said, you know, it's time for us to denounce this, you know, American belligerence and hegemony and they're like the fraud that is the international rules based order. And then within hours of the U.S. attacking Iran, he put out a statement basically in complete lockstep support for it. now he's out with this new thing, which you heard him say, where he's like, well, I support it, but it's also, it's kind of hypocritical and bad, and I shouldn't, but I do.

1:06:46Emily Jashinsky:Right.

1:06:46Dave Weigel:It's like, okay.

1:06:48Emily Jashinsky:It's unclear whether he's saying, he's saying the pretext is good. The pretext of international law is good.

1:06:53Dave Weigel:And the war is good, but the war is not being done legally.

1:06:56Emily Jashinsky:Right, yes.

1:06:58Dave Weigel:And so I want to talk about the role of the Europeans a little bit more with Mazda. He's saying, let's bring DropSite's correspondent back here. Maz, I want to talk about Europe's role here because they kind of get, I mean, good for Spain and Spain is not the one that I'll be talking about here when I bring up last year's events, which walk through how we wound up here in this war, connecting to the snapback sanctions that the Europeans applied to Iran. So when the U.S. in 2017 walked out of the Iran nuclear deal, there was still a lot of sanctions relief from the Europeans to the Iranians because Europeans had also made a nuclear deal and Iran was abiding by the nuclear deal.

1:07:55But fairly recently, the Europeans under pressure from the United States,

1:08:00Dave Weigel:you know, went pretty directly and harshly at Iran when it came to economic sanctions. So what has been the kind of European posture here? Because, you know, they're going to present some level of concern over violations of, you know, the UN and international order. But what What was Europe's role, as you understand it, in pushing us to this situation?

1:08:27Murtaza Hussain:Well, the original Iran nuclear deal that was signed in 2015 was involving the European countries as well. It's been a very critical role in mediating that. And when Trump left the deal, when he violated it, they were very upset about that. Because they viewed the Iran nuclear deal as a great diplomatic achievement. They wanted to avoid another Iraq. Iraq war was extremely bad for Europe. And so they were upset when that happened. And they tried to keep the deal alive to a degree the years after 2018 when Trump left it, tried to give the Iranians some other channels that could trade with them.

1:08:59Murtaza Hussain:But despite that, for the most part, they did abide by the Trump sanctions, the secondary sanctions, the bank and so forth. They wouldn't break those and go against those and continue dealing with Iran. They kind of threw Iran under the bus for the most part, although they tried to maintain some sort of, you know, life preserver to keep the deal at some degree above water. And that continued for a while. But, you know, two things happened in your time. When the Trump reneged on the deal and he re-implored the sanctions, the Iranians stopped completely complying with the deal. They started to enrich uranium beyond the limits set out in the deal itself, up to 60 percent enrichment.

1:09:33Murtaza Hussain:I think 90 percent is a weapons grade. So they were clearly trying to signal that they had leverage. And if you keep doing this to them, they could maybe develop a weapon one day without actually doing that. But basically, they were not in just like Trump was no longer abiding by the deal. They weren't also completely abiding by the deal. They were at least skirting up against the edges of it a lot. So that put them technically out of compliance. But then the other thing that happened, which is a huge, I think, impact on the European view of the situation, is that when the Ukraine war broke out, the Iranians started arming Russia and Ukraine.

1:10:05Murtaza Hussain:They started arming them with these Shahid drones. They helped build Shahid drone factories in Russia. That became a very, very big part of the war, in fact. The Shahid drones had a huge impact on the war for a time. And the Russians improved them as well, too. and they kept developing them. And, you know, that relationship really radicalizes Europeans, I think, on this subject. Because, you know, before that, their relationship with Iran was they were like a middleman between Trump and the Iranians. But now they've become completely hostile. They openly talk about regime change in Iran. I do think that that's a decision by the Iranians to do that, contribute to that a lot.

1:10:40Murtaza Hussain:And now, you know, this is the sort of strange pondering because now all these European countries have basically said that we are done with Iran. and we expect a new government to emerge there. But they haven't explained how that's going to happen. They haven't really, they've kind of put Trump in the driver's seat, and Trump doesn't seem to have any intention of doing that. So it's kind of like leaves it in a very strange position. And, you know, the speech by Mark Carney is very interesting because, first of all, he gave this very, of course, you know, very regulatory at the time and very popular speech at Davos about the new world order.

1:11:10Murtaza Hussain:But now he's back to saying all the same things again quite quickly. And I think there's a couple of things here. First of all, there's the big Iranian diaspora in Canada. It's very politically vocal and very, very anti-government. So they're very pro-the Shah for the most part. But also, you know, I think that Canada doesn't really have many options, actually. Because if you are going to be a non-aligned, multipolar kind of, you know, that's the message that you're trying to send, then you don't really have the power to do that for the most part. You kind of are left to signal back the same international laws and rules that you were saying were irrelevant.

1:11:41Murtaza Hussain:And I think that the Canadian position really does mimic the European position in many ways because they both are sort of dependent on whatever the U.S. is doing and reduced to kind of giving a commentary on that. But I do think that if the U.S. is going ahead with destroying Iran entirely, that will not end well for Europe. Europe will definitely be impacted, even if America is not as directly, because of the geographical proximity. And the Iraq War was devastating for Europe, as I mentioned earlier. The Iran War will be much, much worse. But the fact that they don't really have the autonomy, they don't really have the vision of how to act independently, it means that they're just going to sit back effectively and watch this train hit them if it does.

1:12:18Emily Jashinsky:Javiv Rettiger wrote a whole piece in the Free Press about how this is actually specifically just about China. This is all Trump can't say it for whatever reason because he doesn't want to. I guess the reason that Javiv gives is that he doesn't want to antagonize China. But this is actually, at the end of the day, all about China. Mark Carney has been in hot water for what Trump world sees as overtures to China. And I'm curious, Maz, how you see the BRICS-China dynamic playing out in the minds of like a Mark Carney or Davos world as they consider international law in regard to what's happened over the last week.

1:12:57Emily Jashinsky:Because obviously that's something BRICS country is China. They use examples exactly like this to say, what do you mean international law? So can you give us some perspective on how that could play out in the weeks and months ahead?

1:13:13Murtaza Hussain:Well, I meet Chinese media and social media on a regular basis. And there's not really a tremendous interest in the subject for the most part. The Chinese government does not have huge trade ties with Iran. It's quite limited and lopsided, the trade that they do have with Iran. The one thing they do trade is oil. They buy oil from Iran. But it's a fungible resource, first of all, but it's also kind of a warped relationship. They kind of abide by the sanctions for the most part of Iran. They don't have a defense partnership. They don't have a defense cooperation. They don't sell Iran advanced weapons.

1:13:43Murtaza Hussain:They don't seem to have, they don't have a historic trust with them and so forth. They buy a lot of oil though, right?

1:13:47Emily Jashinsky:It's like 90 % of Iranian crude exports or it's the Chinese market.

1:13:51Murtaza Hussain:Yes, but it's only about 10 to 15 % or 10 to 12 % of China's imports. So it's much more important to the Iranians than it's the Chinese. It could be replaced for the Chinese worst case, or they would even buy it from a different Iranian government. Or if the Iranian government collapsed and still sold oil, that's fine with them. and they don't have a strategic partnership with them. The country they have a strategic relationship with are North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, and Belarus. And Iran is not really on that list in any way. So I think they're trying to say it's about China, it's kind of thing to make this seem like it's about America in a way, because China is very important to America.

1:14:23Murtaza Hussain:But Iran is not important to China, and that's manifested in the lack of support and lack of any kind of material aid that they provide to the Iranians, or even in attempts to try to stop the war from happening. So I don't think that, you know, and I think that one thing it's doing, I think it's already done this before, but the idea of international law, it's kind of become ridiculous in a way, like international law and sense of war and crime and things like this. The Chinese are not expecting that's going to protect them. That's why they're building tons of missiles. And that's why they're expanding the Navy and Air Force at a tremendous rate, because they know that they're not expecting this to take something that's going to rely on.

1:14:58Murtaza Hussain:One thing that they have noticed about the Iran war is the way that the U.S. dealt with the Iranians during negotiations. They use negotiations as a stalling tactic to mass more forces, as a tool of deception and so forth. And they will assume that in a negotiation with the U.S. in the future, potentially over Taiwan or an issue like that, that they may do the same to them. And they will treat any negotiation with that suspicion and with that cynicism about what the actual goals are. But beyond that, they're not emotionally invested in the Middle East. They don't have bases there. They don't have any real footprint per se.

1:15:35Murtaza Hussain:As long as the oil keeps coming from the few select spots that it comes from, that's fine. And they really have much more deep economic ties with the Gulf states, to be honest. That's much more important to them than Iran is. So I don't really find that this is targeted towards China because China is just not that impacted by it. It's really hurting everybody else, though, especially the people in the Gulf states who are directly boarding Iran.

1:15:57Dave Weigel:And just to connect a few dots from this segment, we talked about Poland saying that it's going to now race for a nuclear weapon. We talked about France saying that it's going to kind of expand its nuclear capacity. And that's all related to Russia and to their Europeans' concern about Russian aggression toward them. So it's interesting that the way that you talked about the Iran and Russia relationship developing more tightly as a result of Trump walking away from the Iran nuclear deal and then and then Iran supplying drones and other military technology to Iran and tightening that link. So in a world where Trump doesn't walk away from the Iran nuclear deal, do you imagine that the U.S.

1:16:47Dave Weigel:and Europe would have had more leverage at the time and presently to say to Iran, look, this is a war between Ukraine and Russia. You know, see your way out of this. We don't want we don't want you supplying these drones. Look, your economy is is booming. We've released these sanctions. This this nuclear deal is where everybody's abiding by it. Don't don't don't rock this apple cart. Could you imagine? Could would. So I'm kind of trying to figure out, like, was that a decision that actually, you know, heightened tensions between Russia and Europe in a way that wouldn't necessarily have happened if if Trump hadn't just gone in and because Obama's name was on the nuclear deal and because the Israelis wanted to rip it up, they just ripped it up.

1:17:36Murtaza Hussain:Yeah, there's no doubt about it. And you know, this strategic cooperation that the Iranians and the Russians have, specifically the Shahid drones, that was not even reciprocated in a strategic manner by Russia. They just paid for them. The Iranians need money to their sanctions. So they gave them gold transfers and maybe cryptocurrency, other ways that they paid them outside the international financial system. That was what the Iranians got out of it. The Russians are not rushing to defend Iran or even arming Iran with Russian weaponry, to a tremendous degree, you know, in a strategic way. Maybe they're selling them something, but not in a way which is out of alliance.

1:18:09Murtaza Hussain:So really, it was just out of economic. First, sticking to the Europeans, I guess, say that we have leverage too, but also for economic reasons. That was the overriding reason, really, why they started selling weapons to Russia. And this is actually one of the most important things about this entire issue. The Iranian nuclear program has never been used as a tool of ensuring Iranian national survival by developing a weapon. nor has it even been really used as a tool for developing power in Iran, per se, like electricity. We have huge electricity shortages in Iran. The number one reason for the Iranian nuclear program has been as leverage to negotiate their economic reintegration with the West.

1:18:49Murtaza Hussain:That's why they didn't develop a weapon. That's why they didn't actually integrate it into the national grid and so forth. They were trying to use this as a tool that we're on the outs. We need to get back in. How do we generate leverage? We can do it this way. And, you know, I think it's a very poor decision. And I think that if you're going to develop a nuclear program and even enrich outside of normal bounds, you pretty much are locked in. You better go all the way and build the bomb or don't build the program at all. But they tried to go halfway in this way, which was very typical of the governing styles, the former supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

1:19:17Murtaza Hussain:He tried to be in a situation of lukewarm sort of nuclearization and lukewarm hostility with Europe and so forth, and even the U.S. So I think that that is the ultimate error that the Iranians made. If you compare that to countries like North Korea or Pakistan and so forth, who treated the nuclear weapon as a tool of national survival and ran for it at any cost. There's a famous quote by a former Pakistani prime minister. He said that we will build a nuclear weapon even if we have to eat grass for, you know, 100 years after this. And that's what they did. Pakistan, you know, did suffer a lot for that.

1:19:50Murtaza Hussain:But, you know, Pakistan exists today, whereas maybe Iran won't. And I think that this is a broader subtext of the sort of weird negotiation that's taking place with the Europeans and Americans over many, many years, and which is now culminating in this disastrous outcome for the Iranians. Yeah.

1:20:05Dave Weigel:I kind of hate knowing stuff about the world because it just makes it that much more miserable, knowing that it could be different. It's bleak. Anyway, very bleak. Maz, thank you so much for joining us. People can check out your reporting over at DropSite News. Appreciate you being here. Thanks, guys.

1:20:23David Sirota:This is Ashley Akinetti from the Ben and Ashley I, Almost Famous podcast. iVeam is built for losing weight and moving forward. iVeam is built for feeling your best and seeing real results. iVeam is a medical weight loss program built for you. Their approach is individualized, virtual, integrative medicine. 99.2 % of patients who've completed the iVeam weight loss protocol achieved meaningful change, dropping an average of 45 pounds. iVeem, built for your wellness journey. iVeem, built for real life. When you sign up right now, you can get a one-month free trial. Start your personalized plan in minutes by visiting IVIMHealth.com.

1:21:12David Sirota:That is IVIMHealth.com. Subscription required, medication, labs, and supplements not included. results based on patients who completed the full IV protocol over 68 weeks. Individual results may vary. Not all patients are eligible. Prescription medication may carry risks and should be used only as directed by your provider.

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1:23:06Emily Jashinsky:Well, as we're recording this, it's 925 AM. The CNBC headline is S &P 500 futures tick higher as crude oil trades lower after Iran conflict surge. That's again, what it's showing right now. By the time you see this, markets will be open. But Ryan, I want to roll this clip of Donald Trump responding to questions yesterday in the Oval Office about oil prices. It's a midterm election year. He's focused on cost of living, as his team continues to say. D1, this is Trump, on what could happen, what that might mean for him in the near future with oil and gas prices.

1:23:44Krystal Ball:I'll tell you what, I have never had more compliments on something I did. People felt it's something that had to be done. So if we have a little high oil prices for a little while, but as soon as this ends, those prices are going to drop, I believe, lower than even before.

1:24:01Emily Jashinsky:And he rolled out his plan for the Strait of Hormuz on Truth Social. Let's put the next element up on the screen, writing, Effective immediately, I have ordered the U.S. Development Finance Corporation to provide at a very reasonable price political risk insurance and guarantees for the financial security of all maritime trade, especially energy, traveling through the Gulf. This will be available to all shipping lines. If necessary, the U.S. Navy will begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz as soon as possible, no matter what. The U.S. will ensure the free flow of energy to the world.

1:24:30Emily Jashinsky:The U.S.'s economic military might is the greatest on Earth. More actions to come. Thank you for your attention to this matter. In D3, we can go ahead and put latest oil barrel prices up on the screen. So this would actually be as of yesterday, I think, is when we got this graphic in. So, yeah, crude oil prices surge above$77 a barrel to their highest level since January 21st, 2025, one day after President Trump's inauguration. And then Kobesi letter says on X, a little commentary, The entire oil price decline under President Trump has now been erased. So you can see why he is eager to downplay any concerns or to undercut concerns by saying, well, this is this is great for other reasons.

1:25:16Emily Jashinsky:Oil prices is something we might have to put up with Ryan. Reaction to Trump's comments yesterday. Yeah.

1:25:22Dave Weigel:And it's it's tick. I just noticed it's ticking down a couple bucks, down about 73 or 70, 74 dollars. It'll much depend on if and when this ends. Trump's promise that he is going to escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz and also reinsure them is quite an aggressive step. Reinsurance basically runs the world. That is the actual cabal that runs it. you know if if we stop insuring properties in Florida for instance like forget it like that's that's it and so the way that this works is these massive oil tankers have that have an insurance and it costs a particular amount to get through you know a particular part of the world and the reinsurers once Iran said the Strait of Hormuz is closed said forget it like we're not we're not backing these up because for obvious reasons.

1:26:23Dave Weigel:And so Trump is saying, all right, two things. We'll send in the Navy and we will use our own basically tax dollars through this development finance corporation to offer the insurance itself. And so then it's up to the ships to risk it. Now, the Navy has subsequently said, actually, we don't really have a whole lot of capacity to do this escorting. So all of a sudden, they started getting calls. Hey, I've got a ship stuck. Help me out. Like, no, that's just, we didn't really mean that. But here's the process to get some insurance. So Iran has been attacking a couple tankers and hitting them. And it doesn't take much to completely seize them up.

1:27:06Dave Weigel:Meanwhile, you can put up D4. They've said, and we'll see how effective this is. they've said that Chinese and Russian vessels can get through, which would be ironic if then the U.S. says, well, no, no, they can't. We're closing them. And or do these oil tankers that are stuck reach out to the Chinese and reflag themselves as Chinese and China then gets half of it or something. And maybe, like, we'll, you know, we'll, we'll see. Meanwhile, it's, I think, so what, it's March, right? We're gonna be talking about primaries next with the, the David Sirota and Dave Weigel. Midterms are coming. I don't, you know, I don't know if it's true that the public thinks that this is the greatest thing anybody's ever done and that they're willing to pay higher gas and energy prices because...

1:28:05Emily Jashinsky:Independents definitely don't and won't.

1:28:07Dave Weigel:Yeah. And it's not just that you're pushing, you might push to like$4 a gallon or something like that. It's not just, it filters through the entire economy. Trump actively smashed very deliberately and proudly any attempt to move to renewable energy. And so everything in the economy runs on fossil fuels as though if you push up that price, everything then gets more expensive. And I can't imagine that people are going to be like, oh, well, that's good because at least Israel got to have its war with Iran.

1:28:40Emily Jashinsky:Well, that's why they were so freaked out about the messaging, as we covered earlier, which I think we're arguing is reflective of a conflicted, muddled, inconclusive strategy itself, sort of sprung from that well. But that's why they're freaked out about it, because now when people are looking back on, huh, why are these prices higher? Well, there are these clips that are going to ring in their minds if they follow the news very closely about Marco Rubio saying, well, we heard Israel was going to strike or Mike Johnson saying we heard Israel is going to strike. Democrats will use that. Sympathy for Israel among voters has plummeted.

1:29:12Emily Jashinsky:And that means independence, particularly, if you need them to turn out in a place like North Carolina for Republicans, you have a problem. So let's turn to developments from Qatar. This is the next element, Qatar Energy to stop downstream production. Qatar Energy values its relationship with all of its stakeholders and will continue to communicate the latest available information. That's natural gas, yeah. Yep, LNG. And then the next element, this is the Reuters headline, Qatar smelter shutdown exacerbates Iran war aluminum fears. The impact of the US Israeli attacks on Iran on the aluminum sector deepened on Tuesday after Qatari smelter, Katalem, began to shut down and shareholder Norsk Hydro issued a force measure to customers.

1:30:01Emily Jashinsky:Ryan, everything's going according to plan.

1:30:04Dave Weigel:Right. So this is the way that things cascade through the economy. And so the South Korean market, which has been surging throughout the year, had an absolutely massive sellout, sell off. It hit one of those circuit breakers where they're like, OK, just stop trading. This is an absolute catastrophe. You've had other Asian markets selling off as well. So far, the U.S. markets have, you know, they're volatile, but they're like, you know, they haven't been completely rocked yet. We'll see what happens today. But this stuff then starts to become self-reinforcing. If you are leveraged in a market that dives, and now you've got margin calls coming in, you have to meet that, then you have to sell off other assets in order to pay that.

1:30:59Dave Weigel:And then that dives, and then you have to sell off those. So that's why. And then you have all of these AIs out there trading in ways where they're trying to find little arbitrage around the world. And so that can produce some kind of runaway moves once you break through thresholds that people expect to be stable.

1:31:23Emily Jashinsky:And bear in mind, there is no regime change plan. Donald Trump just said that in the Oval Office yesterday. He said, we don't know if it'll be better or worse. We don't actually know if it's Pallavi or someone else. And so the certainty for people who are trading and trying to make financial decisions here is absent. Nobody has any. I mean, this is already in the broader tariff climate, which is putting a lot of insert injecting a lot of uncertainty into the markets right now. So incredibly shaky global economy. I mean, it's always shaky. But right now, the fragility is on another level.

1:31:56Dave Weigel:Yeah, and I think to me, the markets and the economy and oil prices are everything. And I think Iran understands that. The only language that Trump really understands is this, is money, is affordability, which is called a hoax and which is advisers, I'm sure, every time die inside when he says that. And when he says things like, yeah, people can handle a little bit of pay a little more.

1:32:20Emily Jashinsky:Because I've never gotten so many compliments.

1:32:21Dave Weigel:I've never had so many compliments. Sir, just absolutely incredible, sir. I weep with joy every time I pay more at the pump just so that I can sacrifice on behalf of your genius and brilliance and bravery.

1:32:34Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, that'll go well in North Carolina and Texas.

1:32:51this.

1:32:52David Sirota:This is Ashley Akinetti from the Ben and Ashley I Almost Famous podcast. iVeam is built for losing weight and moving forward. iVeam is built for feeling your best and seeing real results. iVeam is a medical weight loss program built for you. Their approach is individualized, virtual, integrative medicine. 99.2 % of patients who've completed the iVeam weight loss protocol achieved meaningful change, dropping an average of 45 pounds. iVeam, built for wellness journey, IVM, built for real life. When you sign up right now, you can get a one month free trial. Start your personalized plan in minutes by visiting IVMHealth.com.

1:33:41David Sirota:That is IVMHealth.com. Subscription required, medication, labs, and supplements not included. Results based on patients who completed the full IVM protocol over 68 weeks. Individual results may vary. Not all patients are eligible. Prescription medication may carry risks and should be used only as directed by your provider.

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