Iran Shoots Down US Helicopter - Iran War Update with Richard Miniter and Thomas Small

30:39And the answer is, oh, it's just not practical to do that, meaning they haven't thought about it. And they're as brain dead as the Conservative Party has always been, right? Instead of having imagination for the working man, they said to me, oh, well, some of those mines are flooded. I said, yeah, if only there was an invention especially designed for coal mines. Yeah, James Watt, 1750. That's why the steam engine was created, to take water out of coal mines specifically. You have the technology, right? You can use electric. You don't have to use steam. But you could remove the water from the mines.

31:14And, of course, Americans have... No, it's ideological.

31:17Francis Foster:We know it's ideological. Theresa May, the former conservative prime minister, has been on Twitter banging on about how net zero has been brilliant because we've created about three jobs. But, you know, the question... It would not be so bad if net zero and the precautionary principle were not matters of EU law. Of course. And the brain dead conservatives in the UK have no heart or imagination for the working class person for whom earning$100 ,000 a year working as a coal miner would be a very happy outcome in many parts of the north and the west of your country. And they have no ability to think about them.

31:56They think about people who have horses and estates and things like that.

32:02Francis Foster:We're running out of those people as well. Richard, I want to ask you about why we haven't got to a ceasefire of, or in fact, more progress beyond the short ceasefire that we have. Before I do that, we'll just have a quick word from our brilliant sponsors for this episode. And we'll come back and we'll talk about why peace hasn't come yet. Most people think they're informed. In reality, they're selectively informed. Modern media doesn't just tell stories. It quietly decides which ones you never hear about at all. That's why I use Ground News. It's the only app that compares how the same story is covered across the political spectrum and show you what whole audiences are not being told.

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35:16Francis Foster:Richard, coming back to the serious conversation we were having, why is it that we haven't got peace already? Iran, well, does Iran want, does the people who run Iran want peace? No, they want nuclear weapons. That's what they want. And Trump says they can't have them. So, right. So to wear down Western resistance, in this case, Trumpian resistance, to their possession of nuclear weapons, because they want to turn out like North Korea. They want the security that North Korea has. The only way to get there is to have nuclear weapons. The only way to get nuclear weapons is to get the U.S. to relent.

36:01So they think they can cause enough short-term pain because their experience of American leaders from Carter onward was that if you exert enough negative pressure in the short term, Americans just give up and go away. And they do not understand Trump. Let me explain why Trump is not ad hoc, that he is strategic. It is very counterintuitive, right? And you may totally disagree with me, but it's worth considering this hypothesis. If you don't have the time to read Art of the Deal, which actually he lays this out, right? So the normal way politics or change in academia or change in the NGO world or change in the business world happens is some leader comes down from the mountain and says, I have a vision.

36:59Here it is. Here's, you know, my beautiful PowerPoints. Here's my white papers. Here's my positions. Isn't it a glorious future? Let's all work together towards this glorious future. And he tries to get various constituencies to go along, makes a couple of compromises here and there, and eventually builds something like a majority behind whatever that is. And they do it. And it's a long, deliberative process. that is not how trump operates trump thinks this is all a negotiation and a negotiation no smart person starts the negotiation by saying what they want as the outcome because they will not get that outcome if a woman tells you on a first date that she would like to be married and have a baby in six months.

37:45Most men would say no second date, right? This is how real estate deals work. And that is a definitive crucible for understanding how Trump's thinking was shaped. You know, I may be interested in restoring that building that is in your dilapidated downtown, town, but I would need a lot of tax breaks. And I would need you to build a new entrance to the subway. And I would need the sidewalk. You throw all these things out. And maybe you need one of them, but you lay out all the things and then you're so dismissive. Oh, well, you know, the sidewalk things, that wasn't really anything. And you eventually get to somewhere that only you have in mind all along.

38:34That's how Trump works. So the fact that he's changed his mind or he's calling someone an animal one month and calling them a patriot the next, none of that matters. He has a goal. He's not going to tell you the goal because he wants to achieve the goal. And the big, big picture here is, and I suspect this, there's evidence for this, but not enough evidence to prove what I'm about to say. I suspect strongly, based on lots of inferences, that at some point early in this administration, Rubio and Trump got together and looked at a map of the world and said, our main adversary is China. China has said publicly that it wants to go to war with the United States in 2027.

39:23How do we make sure they do not go to war with the United States in 2027? well let's weaken them around the world they are dependent on venezuelan oil let's take that away from them they are dependent on cuban intelligence networks let's take that away from them they are dependent on loan payments from costa rica nicaragua colombia let's take that away from them They are dependent on Iranian oil and Iranian intelligence. Let's take that away from them. Let's take away the markets for Chinese consumer goods in Russia. Let's not get involved in Ukraine, but let's make sure that China's main ally is, that is Russia, is significantly weakened by letting the war in Ukraine drag on every day, not just causing Russia blood and treasure, but diminishing the fearsome reputation of Vladimir Putin.

40:29And so there is a grand global strategy here that is all directed at China. There's a reason why remote Pacific Island bases that the U.S. has not used in World War II have been resurfaced and navigation beacons have been reestablished and why training missions are occurring in the second island chain. there's a reason why U.S. naval forces are visiting Saipan and Guam for the first time in decades. I mean, senior personnel. There's a reason why training exercises are being planned with the Philippines. Also, look at the Straits of Malacca. So everyone talks about the Strait of Hormuz, but Chinese oil also has to go through the Straits of Malacca between, you know, off the Malaysian coast.

41:15Well, both Malaya and Indonesia, which have not been U.S. allies in decades, now have made agreements in the past six months. So that, and India has moved from being a non-aligned nation, unofficially aligned with Russia in the Cold War, to becoming effectively a U.S. ally and using its navy to stop the shadow fleet and reducing its refining of Iranian oil. So if you take Iranian oil from Iran and you trace it, it now has to go past India, which is now more or less in the U.S. camp. It has to thread its way through the Straits of Malacca, past two new U.S. allies, and then enter waters in longtime U.S.

41:59allies, the Philippines and so on, to get to where it's going. If you see it from that perspective, you understand why this was not a war of choice. This is why Iran was, why they're doing Iran now, why they did Venezuela, why the CIA and other U.S. interests are active in the Colombian election, why what's going on in Peru and Nicaragua makes sense, why certain bases are being reestablished, why there's so much diplomacy going on in the Western Pacific. I mean, connect all the dots, because I guarantee you China has, and Putin has.

42:38Konstantin Kisin:Well, that's a fascinating point, Richard. And Thomas, it seems to me one of the things or one of the aspects of this conflict that we never talk about enough is Lebanon and Hezbollah. Can you explain to the viewers and the listeners why Lebanon is so crucial to this particular conflict? Well, because Hezbollah is an extremely powerful, less powerful now than it was five years ago. But a very powerful Iranian-backed, Iranian-financed, Iranian-organized, Iranian-inspired militia that has, as its stated aim, the destruction of the state of Israel in a way. I mean, it couches that in the same kind of resistance narrative that all of Israel's enemies couches their activities in.

43:29But it remains there. A non-state actor totally destabilizing and having almost wrecked the salience of a Lebanese state for a long time. It is Iran's, it's the pointed end of Iran's proxy network right at Israel. And so that's why. I mean, there you go. As long as Hezbollah exists and lobs missiles into Israel, requiring Israel for now over two years to essentially evacuate much of its northern territory, then Israel will want to deal with that situation. And that will play an integral part in any larger Israeli plan to neutralize the threat of Iran in general and a nuclear Iran specifically.

44:17Konstantin Kisin:Because the reality is, Thomas, and push back on this if you disagree with me, we cannot have peace in the Middle East, we cannot have a ceasefire deal with Iran if we don't sort out the issue of Lebanon, but more pertinently, Hezbollah. Well, you say that. I think one of the things that Donald Trump is trying to achieve at the moment, and may be working with Benjamin Netanyahu to achieve this, that's what I was referring to earlier about the good cop, bad cop routine, that it seems that Trump and Netanyahu are at daggers drawn now, but maybe that's more theatrics than we think. And what's actually happening is that having mistakenly, at the time that the ceasefire deal was being negotiated, kind of connected Lebanon and Hezbollah to an Iranian deal, which the Israelis immediately said, look, we haven't agreed to this.

45:11Hezbollah is a separate issue, and it's between us and them. This has nothing to do with Iran. There should not be an Iranian-backed proxy in Lebanon on our border. We do not need the permission of the government in Tehran to attack the people who are attacking us, etc. So when the ceasefire deal that came into effect in early April was being negotiated, It seems, from what I understand, almost like accidentally, inadvertently, incompetently, the two issues were connected. And Iran could say, look, no progress on the Hezbollah front or any outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah is a de facto violation of any ceasefire on our part.

45:55So we can start the war again on that side. So they're trying to disconnect those two files. So it's not that they have to be both solved at the same time. that is the Iranian position. They have to be solved at the same time. That is not the Israeli position, and it is really not the American position either, not really. Everyone would love those two sort of situations to be disconnected. The question is, can Iran be compelled to agree to that disconnection? I think Israel's attack over the weekend on Iran, to which Iran waved the white flag. It basically was like, okay, okay, okay, we won't fight back.

46:35They pretended that it was a great victory for themselves, of course, but it definitely was not. Israel made sure of that, only to be followed the next day by this attack on the Apache helicopter. That's what I meant earlier about now they might be, they sort of tested Netanyahu. They realized, okay, he fought back. Will Trump fight back? Trump has said he's going to fight back. We wait to see if that's the case. But all of this is to some extent involved in the making of a deal, and that deal must be disconnected from Hezbollah.

47:06Konstantin Kisin:Because as with all things Middle Eastern, the more you look into it, the more complicated it becomes. Why do you think I have this long white beard? I've lost my mind. I thought it was your love of Gandalf. I actually want to respond a little bit to what you said, Richard, earlier about the China thing. At the beginning of this conflict, Haviv Gour, the Israeli journalist, published that piece, which made a splash, in which he laid out his analysis saying that, look, no one is noticing the truth, that this is all about China. It made a brief splash, and then it went underground, and that kind of narrative seemed to go away.

47:49In the Middle East, they did not like that narrative. They did not want people to be thinking that this was all about China, because it drew attention away from the fact that it should be about Iran. It should be about that actual genuine threat to all of those countries. And that if it actually is just a larger global geopolitical game, where we're containing China or countering Chinese moves, then we're back into a Cold War world where everything is about the Soviet Union, and therefore whole regions of the world can be laid waste in pursuit of that larger goal. It doesn't really matter if we spend 12 years destroying Vietnam.

48:30It doesn't matter because we're countering the Soviet Union in some way. So the Gulf especially, but the Middle East more generally, would be very disturbed if it was the case that this situation had been allowed to play out in this rather shambolic way in their backyard to further larger global objectives by the American administration. I'm not saying you're wrong. It's actually it seems very reasonable that what you're saying is true. But that is that would be very sort of nerve, you know, nervous making for America's allies in the Middle East.

49:08Francis Foster:And Thomas, speaking of America's allies in the Middle East, what is your assessment of where they are at the moment? Forget the China issue, just this war. You know, there were different people saying different things at the outset. But I think it's fair to say it's gone on a bit. Right. I just think I think that's objectively a reasonable thing to say. I think at the time that it began, only Trump's critics were saying that it would take as long as it did. And all of his allies were saying, you know, I think the title of our Ted Cruz episode is we will win this and quickly. I just I think we've gone beyond quickly at this point.

49:43Francis Foster:And I remember at the time there being quite a lot of enthusiasm from places like the UAE, from places like Saudi Arabia, because obviously Iran is a strategic adversary for them. Has that enthusiasm waned, or are they keen for President Trump to see it through, and do they believe he can? Well, first on the question of how long the campaign was going to last, despite what some people were saying, Middle Eastern allies of the United States did not think that the campaign would be quick. They're not stupid. They know what Iran is. They look across the Gulf and they see that wall of mountains protecting the Iranian plateau.

50:26I mean, Iran is not a pushover nation. So the Arabian allies were not unaware of that. Now, sadly, the realities of democratic, I mean, electoral politics in the West means you have to, I don't know if you notice, guys, you got to promise people all sorts of stuff that's not in any way realistic all the time. And so, you know, so on the one hand, people are saying it'll be fast, it'll be fast. But the Middle Eastern allies knew it wouldn't be fast. I wondered at one point whether Donald Trump knew it wouldn't be fast. Now, that's, I think, not necessarily what I think now. I think he did think it could be quite, quite easy, you know, easily achieved.

51:08So that's, that's, that's one thing. Sorry, what was the other aspect of what you asked?

51:12Francis Foster:I guess what I was asking is, in terms of the Arabian allies, are they happy with the situation and are they prepared to see it through? Were they happy with the situation? No. And also, now we remember, it's not correct to say that they were enthusiastic exactly. You know, the whole war that was launched on the 28th of February did sort of happen in a quite unexpected and chaotic way. The region was adjusting to decisions that the White House took when the protests were launched at the end of December, early January. And Donald Trump began to tweet those very heroic tweets that we all remember.

51:52we're coming to your rescue, go out, protest. Now, my understanding is that that was not pre-planned. That response to those protests was not actually in a coordinated way planned. And it moved forward some plans for resuming the aggression against Iran, which last June had had a first phase. It forced it to move forward a few months. That's my understanding. It makes sense of what actually happened. And the Gulf allies were therefore wary of the drumbeat of war starting in January and then continuing into February. That's why at the time, you remember those reports saying things like the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, MBS, saying publicly, we need to return to diplomacy, but then calls to Donald Trump being like, go for it, go for it.

52:43The truth is actually more in the middle. Those calls to Donald Trump were like, go for it if you have a plan. Is this going to work? Are you doing this properly? Because if you're not, I have to certainly in public say I'm against it because I don't want Iran to be attacking me. By the way, what is your plan, Mr. President? No description of that plan forthcoming. The Arab allies have been kept very much in the dark throughout this process. They are very fed up. My co-host, Amen, the other day revealed that in a private meeting with a very high-ranking Gulf minister, the Gulf minister actually confessed that it is becoming increasingly clear to him and to his colleagues that it would have been better if Kamala Harris had won the election.

53:32They are extremely disappointed in how Donald Trump has prosecuted this conflict. And the trust levels on the Gulf side are very low at the moment.

53:43Francis Foster:Very interesting. Richard, I'm sure you have plenty to say, so go for it. I mean, the Gulf people are deeply unhappy for lots of objectively observable reasons. First of all, they have to make a lot of their water through desalinization, which is a very energy-intensive process. these alienation plants not only cost billions of dollars but they're gigantic very easy for shahid drones to hit um and it doesn't take much to put a relatively small damage to send a shutter through the uae or phoat rain that they will be out of water there's no readily nearby place where they can import water and not and there are no existing pipelines to move it.

54:33So we tend to focus on the other fluid, which is oil, which is how they make their money. But without water, they die. And their desalinization plants are on the coast, right, as you'd expect. So they're very easy to hit. And even small strikes are red alert news across the Gulf. So they feel very vulnerable. However, we see that they're starting to realize that they're going to have to get into this fight. UAE has decided in the last few weeks not just to leave OPEC, which at another point in time would be a giant head. But also, and they're financing pipelines to go around the Strait of Khroumuz into Oman to deliver their oil to tankers outside the strait that the Iranians can shut off.

55:32That'll take months, if not a year, more to complete those pipelines. There's some temporary pipelines, which have very small volumes. But if you notice, other than leaving OPEC, they're starting to crack down on the immense amounts of Iranian money being held in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and starting to cooperate with SWIFT, with the U.S. Treasury, and others on seizing Iranian funds. So this means that they, while they tremble in fear for what Iran could do to their people, also have taken a side, and it's not for peace. They understand this war is going to be, if the Iranians want to fight a war, it's continue to fight a war, which they they seem to um it's going to be long it's going to be a long slog i should say a word about geography here because people have trouble mentally picturing iran if you were to pick iran up and drop it over the continental united states it would take most of the territory from the atlantic to the Mississippi River.

56:44It's a nation of 93 million people, if you believe the latest census count, which is maybe it's off three or four million one way or the other, but it's a very large population and very, as this map shows, very mountainous territory. So you have a Persian Gulf coast that is nearly waterless with no navigable rivers letting seaborn traffic go significantly inland. very little population on the coast and almost 100 miles before you get to anything green. And that only begins as the elevation steeply climbs. I mean, if you remember, if you read Marco Polo's diary as a kid, the enormous angles and complexity of scaling those mountains, it's a fortress.

57:38It's a fortress, they think, given to them by Almighty God. And if you tried to use ground forces, first of all, supplying them with water, food, ammunition, and replacements would expose 100 miles or more of logistical chains that would be perfect targets for artillery, missiles, and drones. But once you got to the mountains, you would be fighting inch by inch. And the Iranians are very good engineers at tunneling, at bunkering. that would be more of a slaughter than the U.S. taking the bunkered positions of the Japanese in the Pacific War. So it's just unthinkable. And they are surrounded to the north by their ally Russia, by Pakistan, which is sort of an ally of the United States, but sort of an ally of theirs.

58:34Bear in mind that the Iranian interest section, which is their version of an embassy, under current diplomatic law, is inside the Pakistan embassy. So if you want a visa to go to Iran, if you have family there, you go to the Pakistan embassy to do it here in Washington. So the idea that Pakistan would be all that helpful to the U.S. is optimistic. It's remarkable, Richard, that you say that because Pakistan has been mediating this deal, a really remarkable, rather stupid part of this entire charade. They are not trustworthy mediators whatsoever. They have lots of skin in the game in all sorts of ways.

59:15There's tremendous corruption involved in this. And so, you know, I haven't read The Art of the Deal. I have to admit, I haven't read it. But I am not seeing, being played out in front of my eyes, a great deal maker making a great and beautiful deal. It does not seem like that to me. It seems like he's making it up as he goes along. Yes, but you have a professional class bias. You're expecting him to act like a professional that announces a big vision. I am part of the professional class. You don't know me. I do not have a professional class bias. I do have a human bias of rationality as the primary driving force of decision making.

59:56Now, maybe I don't understand. Well, rationality is whether the means lead you to your stated goals. which we don't know. So the trouble I have in general with people who remain, who maintain faith in Donald Trump is they can always say, ah, but he hasn't told us what he wants. So we can't actually judge him by any standard of success because we don't know what he wants. Now, okay, great. It's good. It's good for him. It's a good way of maintaining power to keep everyone unable from reaching a conclusion as to whether he's good or bad at his job, because he's not giving you a standard of success.

1:00:33That's what it seems like to me. Well, no, hold on.

1:00:35Francis Foster:On this, I think there's a very clear standard of success, which is do you get, I mean, the minimum, I would say, do you get a better deal than the JCPOA for a start? But ultimately, the measure of success is do you end up with a run that doesn't get nukes, or at least in the next 30 years, right? That's the standard. And I think you're kind of both right. I am very much torn between the two arguments you're making because the one thing that we do not know objectively is how this is going to end. It could end with a big, beautiful deal, in which case Richard will come out of this looking great, or it could end up in a deal that is attempted to be sold as a great, beautiful deal that is as bad, if not worse, on the JCPOA.

1:01:21Francis Foster:And Richard, I will put this to you, right? I am not predicting a deal. I am definitely not predicting a deal. What I described earlier is how Trump's negotiation strategy works. Understood. I think Trump is ultimately going to be forced into a situation where he has to take a large amount of kinetic military action. Because ultimately, the Iranians do not want to deal. And, you know, no matter how warm the bowl becomes, it can't make the soup warm. Right. That's why that Iranian proverb is so important. It's true. You did say that at the beginning, and I agreed with it. I think when you said that this is how Donald Trump's way of operating is the way a real estate developer operates, but maybe to a hammer, every problem is a nail.

1:02:13Maybe to a real estate developer, every problem is a real estate deal. But it is not a real estate deal in Iran. That is not what he is facing. So if he is operating under that assumption, then he is being led down the primrose path by an Iranian class of leaders who I sometimes think we all forget are crazy in the way they see the world. They are crazy people in terms of their ideology. I mean, I don't mean the Iranian people. They're not. They're not crazy. They're just not us. Oh, okay, that's true. I mean, you can visit Broadbore and say the same thing. If honor and Islamic ideology are the two most important things in your life, they're not irrational.

1:03:07Oh, but I'm not talking about honor and Islamic Islam. They're arguing from a set of premises that we don't share. They are highly intelligent. They are capable of long-term planning. They should not be underestimated. And they have spent decades digging these tunnels. and digging these bunkers, not just for their atomic weapons, but for their conventional weapons. And the after-action review is showing, to the Pentagon's horror, that the Iranians have repaired and rebuilt a lot of the things that the Americans bombed, and that some of the bombing that the US carried out was incomplete, and that many military targets remain.

1:03:44So they do not feel militarily defeated, and they do not thought they've lost their grip on the country. So they are very determined foes. I'm not saying that they're stupid. I'm not saying that they're lazy. I'm not saying that they're not talented. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that they're not real estate developers. They don't see the world in those terms. If the Iranian regime was led by people who wanted wealth to make mutually beneficial deals with people to grow their economy and all that stuff, then everything in the whole freaking world would be different. But they're not like that.

1:04:30They actually want to conquer the Middle East and not only want to, believe it is a preordained fact that they will do it because God is on their side. yes it's a very different mentality but donald trump is not treating them like that's what they are it's it's beggars belief it's almost like he can't imagine that there could be people out there who when it comes to it aren't property developers right war is about real estate but it's not truly about real estate it involves real estate right uh right it's like the old one over the ham and eggs, right? The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed, right?

1:05:12It's an old Democratic Party saying. But anyway, look, the Iranians face incredible downsides from making a deal and no real upside. Why should they? The longer they make, in their minds, they're making Netanyahu and Trump suffer. They believe Israeli and Western media that both of those leaders are hanging on by their fingernails. They see a number of events on the calendar, World Cup, just one of them, where they will exert outsized pressure. They know elections are coming in both countries. So they think time is on their side and they have the powerful position, why should they compromise and yield now?

1:05:59And the welfare of the people is simply not a concern at all. I mean, 70 % of Iran suffers electricity and water shortages. The inflation rate is climbing towards 40 % per month. Counterfeiting has become a real issue. Their global market for oil is disappearing, and their source of foreign capital is, By any, pick your favorite measure, they're losing in all of them. If they cared at all about maximizing the welfare of their people, they would be acting differently. But the fact of the matter is that those things are the temperature in Peru as far as they're concerned. They're numbers about distant, unimportant matters.

1:06:46So the question that Trump faces in Iran is, ironically, the same question he faces in fighting Harvard, in fighting the trade deals, and so on. How do you remove an entrenched elite that benefits from the current situation and thinks it has a right to rule forever, when it is neglecting the people that it claims to speak for, who are clearly suffering? He has that problem in Iran, he has that problem in domestic politics, he has that problem in trade politics, he has that problem with China, and so on. How to detach the meat from the host it lives on? From the parasite that is living off the body.

1:07:32How do you do that?

1:07:36Konstantin Kisin:and also there's another part of this puzzle which is netanyahu because america wants their deal but also israel wants a different deal as well don't they what makes you think the deal is different what makes me think the deal is different because i what i think that is Israel want is they want to wipe Hezbollah off the map. Yeah, probably Trump does too. Sorry? Probably Trump does too. I may be wrong on this, but I think Trump prizes expediency over everything else. I think that if he can get a deal done, which will paper over the cracks and it will last three to five years, and that he can dress that up as a win and then head over to the midterms, wave the deal, say peace in our time, I think he would be very happy with that.

1:08:32I think we do need to always disentangle, even in the case of someone like Donald Trump, who's a real political animal, the political dimension from the sort of statesman dimension. I mean, I think, despite everything I've said about Donald Trump, and I'm very frustrated with the man, but I don't think Donald Trump is under any illusions that Hezbollah and Hamas and other parts of Iran's proxy network across the region are anything but horrible, malign actors that get in the way of America's strategic interests. I mean, unlike some of his predecessors in the White House who were happier to accommodate Iran's proxy network in the region or to just kind of assume that they, well, to assume that they had to be worked with.

1:09:20Now, Now, maybe time will tell that that whole side of the American foreign policy personnel who argued in terms of containment of Iran, engagement with Iran, and that's what underlay the JCPOA, and which sometimes pissed off our Arab allies in the region because they saw a Shia crescent being created and the Houthi takeover of Yemen and all that. So there was a period of time when the American policy apparatus was like, no, we might hate Iran, but we're just they're here. They're here to stay. We can't do anything about it. We just got to work with them. Maybe this recent adventure in the Middle East is proving them right.

1:10:02And maybe we just can't get rid of these people. So maybe we just have to live with them. I don't know. But I don't think Trump thinks that. And I don't think that Trump, you know, Trump has been very good at enabling the Israelis to do what they feel they need to do to destroy Hamas, to destroy Hezbollah. Now, you can disagree with that policy, but Trump, I don't think, has disagreed with that policy. And that's different from the politics of it. Yes, he needs a quick win in order to win the midterms. He cares about poll numbers. He also cares about the stock market, which is a massive problem in this whole thing, because people in his family and certainly in his coterie have got very rich on and off over the course of this very wild time.

1:10:45So, you know, he cares about those things. But I also think he does know that Hezbollah needs to be destroyed if there is going to be anything like a well-governed Middle East.

1:10:57Francis Foster:Well, perhaps, Francis, let me jump in very quickly. Richard, hold on one sec. Perhaps a better challenge to separate the foreign policy and military policy of Israel and that of the United States is to say that what I understand Israel would really like to do is to bomb Iran back to the Middle Ages where they don't have any missiles, they don't have any drones, they don't have any serious military manufacturing. They pose no threat whatsoever to Israel. They don't have the money to fund Hamas. They don't have the money to fund Hezbollah. Whereas for Trump, the priority is obviously the nuclear side of it.

1:11:33Francis Foster:Isn't that a big difference between them, Richard? I don't think at the strategic level there is a significant difference between how Trump and Netanyahu see the Israeli and U.S. interests. I mean, it's it's useful theater. I think you take your point of good cop, bad cop. Here's what Donald Trump knows. You have to look at what happened in Donald Trump's formative years. What were the events occurring when Donald Trump was in the early prime of his life? Hezbollah in the 1980s killed more Americans than any other terrorist group in history, with the exception of al Qaeda itself. So there is no, there is a tendency in the Biden and Obama years to view Hezbollah the kind of way management deals with the union, right?

1:12:30Like, we have to deal with them, but they're part of the landscape and they have a right to be here. Kind of. We have to make the best deal we can. It's not how Donald Trump sees it. he, I guarantee you that if you were asked him what happened on the Achille Laurel in 1985, he could tell you, right? I guarantee you, he could tell you about the various terrorist strikes and, uh, U S Navy personnel who was murdered on a hijacked airplane, uh, loudly saying the our father in English, by the way, as he was killed by his captors in front of a plane load of people, right this makes a deep impression on two important people donald trump and suzy wiles as chief of staff who this is a living adult memory for them they lived through this so the idea that they've decided that they're going to just separate uh the way the state department would like to do hezbollah from iran and say we're going to have to live with hezbollah that's not the case i mean that doesn't strike me as plausible and if you look at the white House's reaction to the seizure of the Crusader Castle just north of Latani River in Lebanon.

1:13:44You know what the reaction was? Nothing. No protest. No, oh, you've colored outside the lines. Just nothing. That took away a prime sniper and mortar position from Hezbollah because that was the high point on the far side of the river, right? the fact that there are air raid warning signs now in Christian neighborhoods in Beirut, they are prepared to go north. And I don't think Trump will meaningfully attempt to stop them.

1:14:21And for the Christian community of Lebanon, they seem to be saying and i i you know i talked to a handful of christian lebanese leaders not not enough to really say definitively what the whole spectrum of opinion is but they're not unified oh no and never have been right no like like the medians and the jews and the kurds like there's no one central view right um so um But they've gone from, oh my gosh, we don't want an Israeli invasion, that'll be a lot of useless slaughter, to saying, well, if it gets rid of Hezbollah, that's the only way to save Lebanon. The Lebanese currency is functionally gone.

1:15:09People pay for things in supermarkets now with the U.S. dollar. If it weren't for the Hezbollah power in parliament, Lebanon probably would have dollarized a year ago. So there is a real debate about how does Lebanon have a future with Hezbollah inside its borders. Yeah, public opinion in Lebanon is remarkable at the moment. It has shifted in a way that I think a lot of people 20 years ago would never have believed, that now more and more Lebanese are openly feel bold enough to say that Hezbollah is the proximate problem that must be dealt with and that actually, since that's the case and since their corrupt political leadership and weak political leadership and utterly implicated political leadership aren't able to do it, well, okay, Israel's going to do it.

1:16:02Now, obviously, they also at the same time don't like it. I mean, they can both understand that it's something that it makes sense that it's happening and also not like it. They don't like having to evacuate from their homes. They don't like the fact that the IDF tells the Christians of Tyre, the city on the coast, you gotta go. They know what that means, especially as an increasingly aggressive Israel is prosecuting this buffer zone security doctrine where they're perfectly happy to lay waste to huge tracts of territory on the other side of their borders, both north and south, in order to prevent anything like the 7th of October ever happening again.

1:16:41So I don't, you know, by any stretch of the imagination, I'm not saying that the Lebanese are jingoistically supportive of Israel's moves there, but there is a kind of exhausted realism now that they just realized that the Hezbollah thing has been a problem, that Hezbollah has been a cancer in the body politic of Lebanon, and that the ideology of resistance that has been sort of propagated by Iran, aided and abetted globally by an increasingly deranged leftist kind of ally movement, you know, and ironically, which means in the West, never before have more people been anti-Zionist or never before have people been so openly contemptuous of Israel and unwilling to see Israel's perspective.

1:17:30Just as actually in the region, amazingly, more and more people are willing to see that perspective because they have actually lived the consequences of rather brainlessly holding on to a fever dream of ideologically pure resistance for decades now. So it's a great irony. And going back to the question of Trump and Hezbollah and Trump and Iran, I just want to be clear. When I said that Netanyahu and Trump are working together to separate the two, as it were, files, that's only in the context of the Iranian deal that Trump is trying to get. He knows that if Iran can get the Americans to agree to link its interests with Hezbollah's interests, then that deal will forever be extremely shaky, given the fact that Hezbollah will always spark some kind of conflict with Israel, giving the Iranians the opportunity to say that the deal has been broken, the ceasefire or whatever has been broken.

1:18:27So we will go back to pursuing nuclear ambitions or supporting our proxies or whatever. That's what I mean. But I don't think that Donald Trump doesn't want Hezbollah to be destroyed. I think he does want Hezbollah to be destroyed for all of the reasons you said, Richard. And by the way, I think your phrase exhausted realism is exactly right. There has been such a tremendous change in Middle Eastern Christian thinking from a vaguely, or not vaguely, directly pro-Palestinian perspective 20, 25 years ago, to a studied neutrality five years ago to, yeah, I guess we got to let the Israelis roll their tanks through here and get rid of these invaders.

1:19:15And, you know, it was, this is an old story, but I think it's important. One night I stayed at an Israeli farm on literally on the Lebanese border and I said well your farm workers come in the morning can I talk to them without you around and I just want to hear what they have to say because all the farm workers came from the Lebanese side of the border and the group the workers that had sorted themselves into two groups Christians and Muslims and by the way this farm is now evacuated because of the rocket attacks and the fields are overgrown and it'll take a long time for them to build it back but anyway, so the Christian workers, they said, well, didn't you see our village at night?

1:20:02It's lit up. We have no problem with the Israelis. They are culturally like us. You know, we can do business with them. And then the Muslim group of workers whose villages were not lit up at night, there are very few generators there, and Hezbollah did not supply them any power, said yes we work for the israelis because it's the only people who pay us but uh someday soon this land will be ours and we will be the masters of it and we will prosper from it and these are two groups of workers working for the same farmer on the same land, living in villages half a mile apart. And so, but none of these people were Sunni.

1:20:54These were all Shia. So my last question to them was, where did your father and mother come from? And the answer was always Syria or Iraq. They weren't in Lebanon for more than a generation or two. when people see the exit of hezbollah lebanon what they're talking about is the exit of this entire immigration of people who share a different values and different outlook and are much more ideological than the people who are native there before although i would just want to make sure that we're that everyone understands that surely you're not saying that the Shia of southern Lebanon are new arrivals in Lebanon that would not be true at all of the farmers and such like yes the farm workers that I talked to right and this is years ago and this is you know a dozen maybe right now weirdly when when Iran you know back in the whenever 16th century decided to be Shia, they had to import clerics from southern Lebanon in order to, you know, more or less forcibly convert the largely Sunni population of Iran to Shia Islam.

1:22:12So Lebanon and Iran have been linked together very closely and Iraq, you know, parts of Iraq where the Shia are a majority for many centuries, you know. So a reminder to everyone listening that this story is really old. It's just the latest chapter and a really old story. But I also want to make it clear that what I said about that exhausted realism. When the soldier of Hezbollah had to flee Lebanon, he went and stayed at Mokhtar al-Sadr's house in Karbala. Exactly. And now I also want to make it clear that even though there is a kind of exhausted realism going on in the region, which may be more inclined to see Israel's security actions as a rational response to certain things and no longer just demonize Israel.

1:22:57So that can be true while at the same time, people are extremely angry with Israel on other fronts. The ongoing problem in the West Bank, particularly Area C, but not only Area C, the quote unquote settler terrorism problem, which is a real problem, which is supported by the right wing people who are in power in Israel because they are pursuing a policy which slowly but surely will annex Area C, i.e. the majority of the West Bank. That is true. You know, people know this is happening. They may be less inclined than they were before to see Jews and Israelis and whatever as monsters or as superhuman demons.

1:23:39They might be more on the ground than they used to be, but they can still be really annoyed that in Israel itself, its politics, as it becomes increasingly right wing, largely, but not wholly in response to the 7th of October attacks, which were obviously horrible. They can see that Israel itself is becoming more ideologically committed, often not very realistic, not pragmatic. What does Israel really think it's going to achieve? Does it really think it's going to wish away all of those millions and millions of Arab Palestinians who live in the West Bank and even in Gaza? I don't think they're going to be able to achieve that, but at the moment, there seems to be no realist policy kind of development going on in Israel, like an actual idea of what policy are we working to achieve here?

1:24:30How are we going to create a political solution alongside this military activity that we're ferociously prosecuting. You know, politics, I mean, war is politics by other means, as the man once said, and if you have no political solution in mind, then you're just fighting. There's no end. You have to think, I want to achieve something. Oh, I can only achieve it using force? Okay, I'll use force then. But what is it you're seeking to achieve? I don't think at the moment, perhaps apart from wanting to be reelected or staying out of jail or whatever. I don't think the Israeli government at the moment has an answer to that question.

1:25:14Arabs aren't stupid. They see that. It annoys them, annoys the hell out of them, especially since it has resulted in many tens of thousands of Arabs dying. Yeah. The one way to guarantee a war with a democracy is to attack it and to kill a lot of civilians. So I think when historians write the story of this time in the Middle East, they will see October 7th as a profound miscalculation by Iran. And the debate will be, is this something that Hamas did without... Or is this something that it did specifically at the direction of Iran? because it, to use a phrase from another war and another enemy, it woke a sleeping giant.

1:26:01Israel's political will to go back into Gaza would not be there without October 7th. And if you look back at 17th century American history, it was these Indian massacres of whites that provoked tremendous military responses. and pushing back the people of the of the indian peoples the native americans what what brits used to call red americans or red indians further back west it was and it was a gradual coarsening of relations and a lack of sympathy uh for those because of those attacks right so the trail of tears did not cause a political pushback in the 19th century America because of the decades of attacks, massacres, some exaggerated by propaganda that occurred.

1:27:05And October 7th had a similar effect on Israel. The idea that many people who would not have voted Likud suddenly said, well, these are the crazy people who will actually defend us. And so no other response was really possible. And the fact that Iran couldn't see that the one way to galvanize the Jewish democracy was to attack it. And this may turn out to be an enormous miscalculation.

1:27:34Francis Foster:Guys, we've got five minutes left. Before we get into the last five minutes, I want to blow your trumpet and our own in the process just to say i do not think you will see this quality of conversation about this issue with this level of depth anywhere in the world mainstream media new media is just incredible having you here to talk about all this stuff and by the way to have the principles and courage to disagree when you disagree and to agree when you agree and to do that all with civility and the the level of just uh you know beautiful conversation that we've had So thank you for being here.

1:28:11Francis Foster:People will be loving this, no doubt. Richard, the only thing I want to ask you is you say lots of things, as you always do, where I go, oh, my God, that's incredibly well stated. But when I try and put them all together, I don't quite get it because your belief is Trump is going to have to escalate while also you've described how difficult militarily that would be, while also saying this will be seen as a huge miscalculation by Iran. while also saying Trump thinks he can get this done by August. And I'm just thinking, I don't think he is going to get it done by August. And if the Americans do go in, it's going to be, I don't know what the final result will be, but it will be a very bloody thing, as I think everybody would say, yourself included.

1:28:56Francis Foster:How, like, I don't see this going well from what you're describing for the United States and for Israel. Now, Iran may take a lot of damage in the process, But I come back to the point I've made at the very beginning. It seems to me that, as you said yourself, the peace isn't coming because they don't want it. And they can maintain the current situation long enough that electorally this becomes an albatross around the neck of whoever is in charge when it's still going on. Well, that's right. There's two clocks ticking, one in Washington, one in Tehran. Iranians are betting that the alarm clock in Washington goes off first, that the World Cup, the 250th celebrations, the declining poll numbers of the Republican Party, the declining poll numbers of the president, the fear of the midterms, eventually cuts in their favor and they survive on the terms in which they want to survive.

1:29:50The Trump loyalists are betting that the alarm clock goes off in Tehran first, that they're shutting in oil wells, they run out of storage capacity, they can't make any more money. The U.S. Treasury is doing a fantastic job locking up their resources at banks around the world and cutting them off from customers. And the U.S. Navy is cutting down their shadow fleet, as is the Indian Navy and a few other allies. And so which alarm clock goes off first? Who loses? And I think predicting the outcome and saying someone, this person is, this side is definitely going to win or this side is ever going to win.

1:30:30I don't think that's possible at this stage. I think what I was trying to say about the military difficulty is that a ground invasion would not just be politically impossible, but it'd be militarily unfavorable. The reason why the last successful invasion of Iran was, Alexander the Great. These are a tenacious, intelligent people who've got, for themselves, very fortunate geography. And even the ethnic minorities in Iran do not necessarily want Iran to be broken up into pieces. So they may rally to the mullah's side, and the mullahs know all this. on the other hand the mullah's interpretation of shia islam is distasteful to many you see stories in the iranian language press that mosques are being closed because the the prayers the preaching at juma prayers on fridays are not friendly to the regime um and so you know both alarm clocks are ticking and to say either one is a sure bet i think would

1:31:42Konstantin Kisin:be bad analysis it's that's yeah i know i know how it feels francis doesn't it you just feel like that's the middle east for you no am i wrong no well i know you're not wrong but i i you know it's interesting i don't know i i um i think at the moment it's safer to be pessimistic and because you know i did actually feel to my shame a bit optimistic in february and i thought that a very malign actor. And my heart in this sort of fight is with the Middle East. And I just see Iran as having had on balance the worst record in terms of destabilizing the Middle East, killing people, polluting their brains by brainwashing them, making it more and more sectarian hellhole.

1:32:41So there, for me, they have always been the proximate evil that needed to be dealt with until you could get progressively close to solving the other problems. So I did allow myself to feel optimistic in February. And now I feel like a bit mugged by reality that the United States once again proves its incredible capacity militarily to not achieve political aims. It's just a remarkable record of not being able to achieve political aims, despite this incredible technologically superior force, just unimaginable. America remains so powerful at that level, but it does not translate into political achievements on the ground again and again.

1:33:31And that's a great shame. It's a shame for our allies. It's a shame for the people of the Middle East. That's where I feel at the moment. But I would love to be proved wrong.

1:33:40Francis Foster:Well, our guest on Fridays, Richard, I'm so sorry, we're out of time. I was just going to say before we wrap up that our guest on Friday's episode is going to be Robert Pape, who would argue this is all because there's an escalation trap that the United States has played itself into. We don't have time, unfortunately, to adjudicate that tonight. But tune in on Friday. We'll talk to Robert again to get his perspective. Gentlemen, I thank we, Francis and I thank you both for the incredible insights and contributions and we look forward to having you both on again collectively, separately and in every other way.

1:34:16Francis Foster:Thank you so much. Thank you for watching and listening and it's been a great pleasure having you here. Thank you. Thanks guys.