104: The Iran war isn’t over

Hi everybody, welcome to Ask Habib Anything. It's Wednesday, April 8th. It's the day after Trump announced a ceasefire. I'm on the road, I'm traveling, I'm speaking in the United States, be back in Israel next week. I had to get this out. I don't have my equipment, forgive the audio and video quality, but there's some really important things that need to be said about this ceasefire deal and we'll get through it real quick. Before I tell you what those things are, this episode is sponsored by an anonymous sponsor who dedicated it to the victims of October 7th and of the current war. Thank you to our sponsor. And I want to also tell you please join our Patreon, our Patreon community. It's a wonderful place. It's become very busy and very rich. You ask the questions, they are the guide, the subjects that we talk about and you get to take part in the live streams every month in which I answer your questions live. That's at www.patreon.com slash Ask Habib Anything. So thank you also to our Patreon subscribers. A lot of people were already sensing that this round of the war, of the larger war, was coming to an end when Trump started talking yesterday on Tuesday about annihilating Iranian civilization. It was such a strangely incoherent threat and precisely the kind of threat that wouldn't phase a mukhawomal regime to the episode 93. It seems more like a repositioning ahead of the ceasefire he knew was coming. In other words, the ceasefire was coming. He was going to announce it in a few hours. He wanted his threat to seem like the thing, the position, the Iranian capitulation as he would claim it to be. Israeli sources were telling Israeli journalists, literally a day before the ceasefire announcement, that Netanyahu was advocating a major expansion of the war to include Iran's economic base. Now, that makes sense for Israel. The IRGC and the Iranian regime control well over 50% of Iran's GDP. This is a country run like a Marxist dictatorship and that's because a lot of its actual ideas, and again this is an episode 93, are Leninist Maoist ideas. Shia drag basically, sort of layered on top with Shia eschatology and theology, but the core idea of the people's war, the core idea, everything except the martyrdom vision of Imam Hussein, is basically the Marxist Leninist, maybe Maoist vision of the world. As Lenin said in his 1916 book, that the apotheosis, I forget the words he used, but the natural end of capitalism is imperialism and all the evils of the world are the great evil imperialist arrogant powers and the role of the believer is to be the weak and humble who inherits the world as the Koran says. Jesus said, and the book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible says, the weak and humble inherit the world, therefore we will ultimately be victorious against the great arrogant powers, therefore death to America. This is the great vision. The Israelis need the regime, the idea to fall. The regime owns the Iranian economy. The Iranian economy has to bankrupt itself for the regime to fall. That's the natural Israeli military conclusion, strategic conclusion. There is no alternative. It's either that or the regime doesn't fall and we have another war. The Americans don't want to go there. They don't need to go there. They certainly don't want an midterm election year to pay the cost of the rise in oil prices that would be involved in actually tackling the Iranians at that scale and what the Iranians could then do in the Strait of Hormuz and to oil shipping and to the oil infrastructures of Qatar and Saudi and Emirates, etc. So this was the point where Israeli and American interests diverged. I have talked about the point where they diverged Israel and America were fighting a very much overlapping war with overlapping interests, but not an identical war, not identical interests. They were targeting different things and they had different visions for how it would end. Then people, you know, more clever than I and wiser and more experienced than I were saying the same thing. This is something that's been part of the conversation. There would be a point of divergence between the US and Israel. We seem to have reached it. Both of the countries want to end Iran's nuclear program. Both of them want to end its missile production capabilities, its ability to shut down 20% of the global oil supply at will, but they had different levels of pain they were willing to inflict because they had different levels of pain they were willing to absorb. Israel has threatened enough to be willing to see this to the end, to risk mass harm to the Iranian economy generally, even though it wants an Iranian people free of the IRGC regime. It's willing to go to a level of pain for the Iranian economy that America wasn't because it would also mean a lot of pain for the global economy and for the American taxpayer and voter more importantly. In that vein, it's not a coincidence that Trump's ceasefire announcement, which was very enthusiastic yesterday and even promised that Iran would stop enriching uranium, something the Iranians explicitly haven't agreed to coincided with Republican candidate Clay Fuller's win. If you were following this and I had a driver in the US yesterday who was following it and didn't stop talking to me about it in the Tuesday runoff race in Georgia's 14th district, Clay Fuller won in this deep deep red district against his Democratic challenger. He defeated him handily by 10 points. So why is a deep red district going to the Republicans so easily a story? Because Trump carried the same district in 2024 by 37 points a year and a half ago. If deep red parts of Georgia can be so threatened by a lot of the displeasure of the conservative camp in America, conservative voters, they are probably very susceptible to gas prices. They probably don't have all that much concern for a lot of the great geopolitics questions, but gas prices are gas prices. And if gas prices have spiked massively, that affects every working class person in America. And so, you know, if deep red parts of Georgia can be threatened, purple districts, swing states can be much more threatened and the midterms loom very large for Republicans. And so Trump is, it's quite reasonable to think that this war is quite unpopular. There are different polls that say different things, depending on how you ask. It's quite reasonable to think that the war will become more and more unpopular as the cost to the American taxpayer rise and that Republicans are very scared of the midterms. And therefore that this really is an American retreat from the battlefield. Now Iran's military is decimated. SENTCOM said so, they're right. The damage to the regime, to the nuclear program, to the missile production capabilities, immense, immense and it'll take them many, many years to recover. Basically, everything this regime has except the national energy system, which damaging that would harm ordinary Iranians en masse, and the cheap stockpiles of missiles and drones that they need to close her moose indefinitely, pretty much, everything except those things, and we'll talk about that in great length in a moment, everything except those things has been smashed. Iran is set back, you know, decades and rebuilding all those things will be extremely difficult given the sanctions and given the limits that are placed on Iran. And Iran is not going to come out of this handing over the uranium enrichment capabilities and digging out the uranium stockpile and handing it over to the Americans or the Russians. That's not something that this regime, that a Mukul, a regime that a revolutionary resistance regime is capable of doing. And so Iran is massively set back in many conventional ways, but it nevertheless has the ability to still retain this one great hope. It wants to make America's retreat from the battlefield, okay, into an Israeli retreat as well. And that's what you should be watching in the very short term. Iran has already said it won't reopen Hormuz. This is Wednesday, April 8th, you might be hearing this a day later and something might change. They're refusing to open Hormuz until Israel stops its own airstrikes against Hezbollah and Lebanon. Israel said publicly that the ceasefire does not include Lebanon. And Pakistan, which mediated the ceasefire, said it does. Iran said it does. The Americans said it doesn't. It seems to be that this is the crux or the question that tells us who won and who lost. The Iranians are saying if we've already forced America to blink because of gas prices, then this needs to be the moment that brings America crashing down on the Israelis to get them to stop completely. Because if Israel continues in Lebanon, Israel's continuing to demolish Iranian capabilities and Iranian proxies. And if Israel doesn't do that, if this isn't what's happening, then the American retreat isn't really a retreat. It's just a handing of the baton back to the Israelis. The US is going to demand, as in exchange for the ceasefire, a reopening of Hormuz. Iran at the moment is refusing as long as Israel is still fighting in Lebanon. Is this a handing of the baton to again returning to Israeli Iran war? Or is this an actual end because we made you blink? And that's going to be decided not actually in Iran and not in Washington so much, but in Lebanon. And there's a really more fundamental question that's going to be decided over this question of whether this war actually ends now from the Israeli side, which is can Iran really hold the global oil supply hostage? And will it succeed in holding the global oil supply hostage? For Hezbollah. Is Hezbollah enough of a reason for Iran to hold the Straits of Hormuz hostage? And for the world global? And who then falls down on the road? Where does the blame get apportioned on the world stage if Iran is still holding up the oil supplies because Israel's bombing Hezbollah in Lebanon? And so I think the Trump administration is pulling back, trying to stabilize oil prices, reopen Hormuz, saying, hey Israelis, we're not going to lose an election for you. But also saying the actual war to bring down Iran just enters a lower simmer, which is the Israelis against Hezbollah. And we'll pick it up again after the election season or whenever is convenient or useful or intelligence tells us we can hit something valuable. I don't know the answer to all these questions. But if you're thinking in these terms, then you're paying attention. It's possible that Trump is desperately looking for a way out. That's certainly how the Iranians are depicting it right now, as well as Trump's own domestic opponents. But they've depicted these kinds of equivocations on his part. They've depicted them that way in the past. He's too scared to attack. He's pulling back the Iranian great Iranian spirit has defeated the evil arrogant American powers. And a minute later, he kills the Supreme Leader. I wouldn't if I was the Iranian, what's left of the Iranian IRGC command and control infrastructure, I wouldn't be too confident that this is over, not for the Israelis for sure, not even for Trump. And in fact, we saw this uncertainty, this Trump uncertainty principle, we can call it, at work on Tuesday. When Trump declared, quote, a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again, if our Moses it reopened. He was actually maneuvering to position himself better to declare a ceasefire, to head off what was an Israeli push to go after the Iranian economy in a vast and serious way. He was doing the exact opposite of the very thing he was threatening, the Trump uncertainty principle at play. It's just how he does business. It's unpredictable to allies, to enemies. It's sometimes a huge problem. It's sometimes an immense military advantage. And given the uncertainty of Trump, the, the dilemmas that Israel now faces, and how Israel has to maneuver through all of this, the capabilities that Iran still has, and how much it's willing to escalate, and how much damage will actually take to actually instigate a domestic uprising again. And given all of these variables, all of this unpredictability, with each side maneuvering in smart ways, in very clever ways, using whatever means they have to maximum effect, often failing, often stumbling, but also acting a lot more boldly and a lot more successfully than any outside observer would have expected a year ago. And I'm talking about every actor here, Israel, Iran, the US, the Emirates, who knew Gulf missile defense was so good, so advanced. I didn't. Many experts have been writing about how much they've been learning. Faced with all of those unknowns, it's always helpful. And this is where I think I'm going to try and really position us. And I want to take us to this place. It's always helpful to pull back from the fog of war, from all the fuzziness of the details that are always uncertain from the propaganda debate and the psychoanalysis punditry about each leader. And that's, it's just to dominate the airwaves. It's what everyone is talking about. To pull back from that and to take a look at more fundamental things. And when we look at those fundamental things, I think we're going to see something very clear. If you want to know where this is going, whether America won, whether Iran managed to fight the great American superpower to a draw, which would be an extraordinary achievement, even given all the costs Iran has paid and the weakness that the Iranians of the Iranian state coming out of this war, whether the Israelis achieved their goals, or whether Netanyahu, as opposition leader Yair Lapid is now arguing, has actually delivered for Israel a disastrous strategic setback. If you want to have the tools to seriously judge these questions, not in the immediate political sense, but to have a sense of what's going to happen going forward, the first and most basic question you have to ask, and this is going to be my key point, is the timescale. After the June war, the media coverage in the region and in the west constantly emphasized that the war had ended. Al Jazeera headline June 24, Israel and Iran agreed to ceasefire, raising hopes of an end to the dangerous conflict. Reuters, Allah, Rabia ceasefire now in effect, raising hopes of an end to the war. An institute, a think tank writing about the Trump statement, the war would officially end after the ceasefire took effect. CBS News, Israel drops all wartime restrictions, freeing people to return to their lives. In other words, post-war normalization was entering into effect. The war is finished, civilian life resumes. The economic response also suggested everything was over, markets rallied, oil prices stabilized after the June war, diplomacy suddenly became what everybody was talking about, even if the diplomacy was kind of irrelevant. It was what the media was focusing on because this bounded event had ended, the news cycle has the memory of a fly, of a house fly, and everything had moved on. But the June war wasn't a bounded event, nothing was actually decided. How could it have been decided? The fundamental points weren't resolved. Hezbollah still stood, and Hezbollah will still seek permanent war until Israel's disruption, even if it imposes utterly catastrophic costs for Lebanon. Iran's regime thinks in the exact same terms about Iranian society, all sacrifice, up to and including mass sacrifice of their own economy and their own polity, is legitimate to lay on the altar of the world redemptive Moukawama. And Israelis, they also have a narrative of what's happening, which also tells them it's not over. The Israelis think they're living through a new version of the old pan-Arabist, Nasserist clash, when Arab armies united since the 50s behind Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and this Arabist nationalist idea that briefly saw Egypt and Syria unite into a single state. These armies together would come at the Jews, would come at the Zionist Israeli evil entity, and defeat them and usher in a new era of Arab pride and power in the world. And this idea died for a very specific reason and in a very specific way. Again and again and again, it met the Israeli army in the desert, in case of the Egyptians in the south or in the Golan Heights in the north. Again and again and again, it met the Israelis. And again and again and again, it was clobbered by them until the idea itself was fatally undermined just by its own unbroken string of failures. At some point you have to deliver the promise. And it was two generations of war and failure that made the idea die. That's what the Israelis kind of think is happening to them now with the Moukawama concept. Now it's harder to achieve this kind of idea, this kind of victory, where sheer constant failure will discredit the Moukawama is much harder to do than Nazarism. As we explained in the episode on the Moukawama, Khomeini, the founder of the Iranian regime, explicitly refrained Islamic weakness, Islamic poverty, the backwardness of Islamic societies compared with the strength and advancements and economic power of European imperial powers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Khomeini explicitly refrained that gap in power as a kind of spiritual cleanliness, purity, as the very thing that over the long term with enough sacrifice and martyrdom would guarantee victory. Weakness became good, a spiritual good, and ultimately therefore a geopolitical good because spiritual purity in Islam has long been associated with geopolitical success and the growth of an Islamic empire and Islamic conquest and confidence on the world stage and therefore sacrifice, martyrdom, including mass sacrifice of an unwilling population became in Khomeiniism the fundamental mechanism of war, the thing that closed the gap between the weak and the powerful, the weak but pure and the powerful but corrupted spiritually. That sacrifice was the great leverage that these movements hold over their adversaries. And besides mass sacrifice and mass destruction of everything around them as they fall, what does the Iranian regime actually have to deploy? What does it actually bring to the military confrontation other than the ability to set everything else on fire and personally murder its own people in their tens of thousands and probably they'd be willing to go to the hundreds of thousands, Khomeini before he died basically sent as much in January. In other words, this enemy, like other offshoots of Marxism to which it is an ideological sibling, is not as easily disproven or undermined by forcing it to fail repeatedly by the sheer weight of a failure of self-destruction of its own incompetence, of its own internal tyranny. There's always some theological validation to fall back on that the Mukawama has that secular Arab nationalist Nazarism didn't have. So this is a harder nut to crack. Then again, Israel of 2026 is orders of magnitude stronger than Israel in 1956 or 67 or 73. And it's more resilient and it's more steadfast than its enemies ever allowed themselves to believe because they're ideologically locked in to this desperate need to frame the Israelis as weak, as inauthentic, as Western, as fragile as all these European romantic notions of what's bad about the modern Westerner as opposed to the authentic Browne Easterner. All of these European romantic notions imbibed by these ideal odds of the Mukawama projected onto Israel, everything bad about the West. Well, Israel isn't that it doesn't have those weaknesses and in fact it can stand its ground. And it has because it is Western enough to be democratic, the competence to actually crush the things that come at it. And so the Israelis genuinely think they are in a 25 year arc in the way they had to face Nazarism and Arab pan-Arabism that will eventually defeat the Mukawama through unbroken failure. That's the idea. These are two adversaries that are ideologically built. They have the ideological toolkit to continue this. And they almost can't not continue this. Iran cannot let Israel stand. Or the whole story of Muslim return to power through the great purifying weakness slash martyrdom making us powerful will turn out to be incorrect. And more to the point, neither of these narratives, not the Mukawama, not the Israeli sense of a rehash of the struggle against pan-Arabism, has yet been disproven, has actually lost. Iran has lost nearly all its conventional capabilities, most of its ability to make any kind of conventional war. But at the same time, it demonstrated the actual depth and the profundity of the fragility of the global energy system. And the extent to which the future of war has become basically an arms race between missile and drone arsenals on the one hand and missile defense capabilities on the other. If you master one of those two, missile and drones or missile defense, you survive. If you master both, you win. That's the future of war. And the Iranians have figured that out. And Israelis, Americans, Westerners are just figuring it out now. All of which brings us to what I think is the one coherent and clear and inescapable conclusion of the Iran war, which I'm just going to lay out in four words, that it isn't over, that it isn't over. Two great lessons were learned in this war, the shallowness of interceptor arsenals and production lines. We don't have enough. There aren't enough interceptors, and the production lines are woefully inadequate for the future of war. Against Iran, never mind some kind of great power confrontation with China. And two, the vulnerability of choke points and energy infrastructure. Those are the two major lessons. I want to just lay out a really basic, really, really fundamental point about war. You learn this and, you know, your first year as a history student at a decent university. And it's a point that's especially true of indecisive wars. Of wars, we're neither side lost, but each side still is trying to figure out how to shape whatever happened to a future victory, which is that the war, the indecisive war especially, is the laboratory for future success. This is everywhere. Okay, take a class in college about World War One, and you will learn that the Germans and the French and the British, mostly the German, most intensely the Germans, because they really lost at the Treaty of Versailles. And so this was, this was burning in them. This was a desperate strategic need. Their interests were desperately served by learning the lessons of World War One. But the great lesson was that static trench warfare is disastrous, massively costly, catastrophic. Somewhere in France, there's a memorial to the class of 1914. So many of the class of 1914 died that it's literally a memorial to that cohort. Instead of getting bogged down in trench warfare and catastrophic trench warfare, you need to engage in a war of mobility. They learned from World War One, especially the Germans again, although the Allies indeed, they would prove that they were learning it quickly as well, the importance of combined arms, infantry and artillery and tanks and air. They learned that industrial capacity was decisive, that logistics were decisive. Air superiority became central. And in fact, air superiority became so central that the Allies focused on it. And so on D-Day, when they landed D-Day, a lot of things went wrong on D-Day, almost everything went wrong on D-Day. But D-Day was nevertheless successful. And one of the major reasons was that the Luftwaffe wasn't there to save the day for the Germans, because it had been decimated in the air war that preceded the invasion. Every war is the classroom for the next war, the Winter War, the Soviet-Finnish War, where the Soviets invaded Finland in 1939-40 in the winter. It was a victory for the Soviets, but it was a disastrous victory for the Soviets. They lost five soldiers for every one Finnish soldier loss. And that disaster may have saved the Soviet Union when they were later invaded by the Germans. It was so costly and so embarrassing that even Kamerad Stalin couldn't help but notice that his mass purges of the military command chain had gutted institutional memory and talent and leadership capability and the adaptability of the Soviets in the battlefield. And so a whole lot of officers who had been purged were reinstated. The military command structure was allowed to partially recover from those devastating purges as a lesson from the Winter War. Well, that lesson, in addition to training logistics, many lessons from the Winter War served the Soviet Union in good stead when it faced the Nazi invasion, the much greater threat. You learn the lessons of the previous war and everybody's learning the lessons of the previous war. Everyone is always learning on the battlefield. Every engagement is a flood of new data, of new lessons for the next engagement. This is the structure of war since writing was invented and people could knowledge could be preserved and people could learn lessons across generations. And that's what's going to happen now. This war isn't over. It isn't bounded. It isn't ending. It isn't over for the Iranians in their redemption war. It isn't over for the Israelis who think the Iranians will never stop. And so they themselves will never stop. Instead of asking ourselves, you know, is the war over who won, which is a really silly thing to ask mid-war after a single battle, let's ask what this war represents in the context of how the Israelis and Iranians actually understand it, which brings us back to the two great lessons of this war. Missile defense. The United States has already put in the order to massively increase its production capacity for missile defense interceptors. It's been doing that. It's been increasing that capacity for years now, for at least a decade, but it's nowhere near where it needs to be. Every round of conflict with a middling Middle Eastern power, drains the American stockpile of years of production. These stockpiles, these production capacities, they don't need to double or quadruple. They need to grow a hundred fold. It's not enough to say that from a production of a hundred a year of that interceptors, America has to increase to 400, which is the new Pentagon order. It has to increase to 4000. And these are incredibly extensive missiles. So we need to make them cheaper through technological innovations, through finding ways to do the same thing with much less incredibly exquisite, technologically advanced missiles or sheer economies of scale. If you produce 4000 of a thing, as opposed to 100 of a thing, each one will be cheaper, even if it's exactly the same thing, just because you're producing it at scale. Here's the thing. Missile defense is the future of war. Every enemy everywhere. I mean, if Somalia tries to retake little Somali land in its north, and Israel intervenes because Somali land is a new ally or the US or Saudi or Egypt intercede, just to retain control over Babel Mandab, that local conflict could shut a main shipping artery from China to Europe. And it could be shut with technologies that Somali local warlords could practically get off hardware store shelves. Hundreds of dollars a drone, no more. That's what those drones represent. And we've already seen it from Russia, we've seen from China, the ability to use these drones in mass swarms in the hands of countries that are capable in that way, to create saturation attacks of ballistic missiles or drone swarms that every currently existing missile defense system would be overwhelmed by. And the effect of a mass saturation attack of ballistic missiles on a city and an enemy city could be the same effect as a small nuke, but unbelievably more difficult to intercept. These aren't just fears of the future, these are realities. Russia deployed tens of thousands of drones against Ukraine. Iran launched hundreds of missiles in a single valley at Israel to penetrate its missile defenses. This is what war is now. And Iran with its cheap and spread out stockpiles of cheap drones and missiles closed the straight of her moves. So yeah, it has no military. Yeah, it no longer has a navy or an air force capable of flying or production factories. It doesn't need them. It has enough to hold the global energy system by the throat for as long as necessary, until even the greatest powers in the world have to concede. Missile defense solutions to this type of missile and drone war are as critical to the future success and safety of each and every nation on this earth now as building an air force was in the run up to World War Two. It was decisive. And now everybody gets it. Now everybody gets it. A hundred fat interceptors a year is not going to cut it. Not even 400. It's a complete misunderstanding of the future of war. Israel is probably today the world leader in terms of the effectiveness of its missile defense coverage over the country. Layered missile defense short, medium distance, short distance, you know, it's not deploying lasers in a serious way for the first time. Even Israel is woefully unready for the kind of war that will be the next war with Iran when the regime is even more desperate. When it doesn't have any other options, doesn't invest in any other things. Israeli officials have said they have dramatically accelerated production of arrow three interceptors. But nobody thinks that's actually enough. They cost two to three million dollars per interceptor. That cost has to come down. Ballistic missiles have to become targetable with cheaper and slower interceptors. Iron Dome, Tamir interceptors, for example, is something that Israelis, according to news reports, are working on now. How to make cheaper interceptors do the same work. All of this is necessary, but all of this has to take leaps and bounds forward. Israel is currently dependent on the US for resupply of interceptors. That's a problem the Israelis are working on. That's not healthy, not for America, not for Israel. America can't crank out enough Patriot missiles to satisfy just the demand of the Ukraine and the Gulf. And as I said, years of production of Patriot interceptors were shot in two weeks by Gulf countries. Never mind the hundreds and hundreds that have been sent over to Ukraine. This question of interceptor missiles is now fundamental to the future of war and needs a commensurate investment. That's what we need to be building. The next round, we'll show that. The next battle in this war will show new solutions to Iran's great threat, which is the ability to still blow everything up around it, even without a functioning military, through these cheap and scattered stockpiles of missiles and drones. The second point, the second great lesson, choke points. I'll keep it simple and obvious. Choke points are the Achilles heel of the nations of the world that prioritize prosperity and happiness over ideological insanity. Gas prices hurt American voters. American voters matter to American leaders in ways that the pain of ordinary Iranians don't, doesn't matter to the fanatics of lead Iran. So if you've caught off 20% of the global oil supply, that's a powerful and easy step for a regime like Iran to hold a massive amount of leverage over an elected government like the United States. And that's why choke points can't be allowed to exist any longer. The future of war, the future of America's ability to stand against Chinese expansionism in Asia, for example, depends on it. Saudi opened a pipeline to the Red Sea to keep oil flowing. When the Strait of Hormuz was closed, that needs to be multiplied tenfold. There need to be multiple pipelines buried underground, hardened against the attack that can handle millions of barrels per day and can be turned on with the flip of a switch. Hormuz has to become one option among others, not the only viable option for large-scale cheap shipping. The same is true of goods, by the way. Truck and rail networks have to become reliable redundancies in case of the closure of Babu Mandab to circumvent Suez completely. And the whole thing has to be activated at the push of a button. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be as cheap as sea shipping, but it has to massively lower the cost of the global economy if the choke points are shut down, if a regime like Iran does what Iran just did, or the next war will be defined by these disruptions. And the one after that, even more so, it's the only leverage they have. And if Trump really has pulled back from the battlefield, then Trump has taught them that it works. Iran learned the value of choke points. And so choke points have to go the way of the musket. We have to have diversification. We have to have redundancy. We have to deny the Mukawama strategy of redemption through never-ending destruction, that kind of leverage over the free world. I can't end this without a word on American politics right now, specifically Tordisro. There are very few people in this world as bullish on America, as basically pro-American, as you can't know the Jewish history of the 20th century, with a great many complaints about America, which closed its doors to the Jews, including in the Holocaust. But you still can't know that history without knowing that America was the best there has ever been for Jews. And the American-led world order was the safest there has ever been for Jews. But here's the thing about America. It has this nasty habit of being completely incapable of managing any kind of foreign policy that isn't an extension of domestic political squabbling. Okay, Obama literally, the start of Obama, the first Obama term, defined their foreign policy as when the opposite of Bush, even when being blindly anti-Bush in the Middle East undermined Obama's own policies. He gave the speech in Cairo, the Middle East was unimpressed, but the Obama folks in the Obama White House were deeply impressed that he was not Bush. Trump then did exactly the same, turning on just about anything coded as Obama, and having to backtrack on some of it on the world stage, because it was a good policy, even if it was an Obama policy. It's a kind of whiplash that the world goes through every time a new American administration takes power. Biden reversing Trump, Trump reversing Biden. If Democrats take the White House in 2028, then the media foreign policy conversation will be dominated by almost everything except foreign policy. It'll be all about the political gamesmanship. When it comes to the Middle East, they'll be talking about whether it's good for Israel or bad for Israel, whether Trump lost too much support on the Iran war, and that's a great lesson going forward. It'll only be about domestic politics projected onto the world stage. Nobody will be talking about what's actually happening on the ground in the Middle East and how America actually needs to respond to what's happening to ensure its long-term interests. Nobody will be talking about the ideas and cultures in the Middle East that profound the effect American interests in the Middle East. Even when Americans think they're talking about the world, they're still only actually talking about their own internal political feuds. And that's not great. It's a destabilizing thing for the world. Every time a party switch out in the White House, the whole world gets whiplash. But at the same time, it's very old American cultural peccadillo. It's as old as and it's as American as apple pie. It's as American as jazz. Here's the thing. When America's foreign policy debate inevitably is consumed already has been consumed by America's internal political squabbling. That won't change the reality on the ground in the Middle East. Israel isn't a political football. It's a country. Millions of people, its own unique language and culture. It has an enemy in the Iranian regime that has never stopped swearing to eliminate us. Not eliminate us in the sense that the Washington Post talked about in the profound ignorance of the Washington Post's obituary writers when it wrote the obituary for Khamenei, not through some kind of referendum of Israelis and Palestinians. That's a little publicity stunt of some parts of the Iranian regime over the years. But even then, the referendum includes every descendant of Palestinians everywhere on earth. Not by the way, every Jew eligible for al-Yandr the right of return or every even Israeli overseas. It's a referendum geared to one specific outcome. But the Iranian regime never believed in it. It was meant to full idiots who work at the Washington Post and don't know the first thing about the actual regime in Iran. Iran doesn't actually care about referendum and votes. Iran wants to destroy Israel through an extermination as a detrition war, has said so constantly for decades and built up the capabilities to do so, and then actually launched those wars and capabilities and attacks. America can sit all this out. It really can. The isolationist impulse is legitimate. Americans have limited amount of money, tremendous debt, a lot of needs that don't need to spend anything outside their borders that they don't want to. I'm not at all sure that America's military aid to Israel is something that'll last or that should last. But even that doesn't fundamentally matter. America is going to discover if it does turn inward and ignores the Middle East, that the vulnerabilities that Iran discovered in the global energy markets, that the ease with which you can shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and the vulnerability of American politicians to that happening, will only become more desperate, that that leverage will only be used more, that because the very regime that chanted death to America for 47 years, that picked up the notion that America is the great evil of this world from Leninist Maoist roots imported into Shiaism, that very regime is going to double down on Pershing the West. Using this one lever of influence, it can reliably sustain. America will get sucked in anyway. America should have an actual policy sustainable across administrations, wise and thoughtful. It won't overlap with every Israeli need, desire and policy interest. But America should have a sustainable and reliable foreign policy if it wants to keep any stability, stable and loyal local allies, whether it's the Israelis or the Gulf States. America will get drawn in, it needs a policy for that. It's not enough to just pull back and save the hell with them all. Israel for its part, doesn't have that luxury of sitting it all out. The enemy is still coming for us. There are lessons to be learned. There are tactics and strategies to be improved. The war goes on. Thank you for listening.