The Iran Escalation Doom Loop

Welcome to Tech Right Now, the weekly podcast of The American Conservative. I'm Andrew Day here with my colleague Harry Berger, and we've got a great guest today, Arta Moeini PhD, the director of research at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. Arta is an expert on Iran and US foreign policy, and indeed that's what we'll be discussing today. But first, Arta, where can our listeners find your work, your social media, anything else that you want to plug?

So IPD, which is a realist think tank in Washington, the website is peacediplomacy.org. They can follow a lot of our different perspectives on there. My own personal Twitter or X account is @ArtaMoeini. You can see it, I guess, in the bottom of the video, A-R-T-A-M-O-E-I-N-I. And we also have a publication that's a bit more sort of highbrow called Agon that focuses on radical realism and scholarship deals with the new world order and questions of modernity and its problems, let's say. So those three outlets.

Yeah, I have a background in political theory and Agon sounds like the kind of name that a political theorist would give a highbrow journalist. So that's a cool title. I might ask you toward the end of this episode about radical realism and what a radical realist would make of the world that we are entering into, which a lot of people fear is a kind of mocked politique, might makes right kind of world. But before we get to that, I just want to start with the Iran war more specifically. Today is, I think, the 11th day of the war. We're recording on Tuesday afternoon. Arta Moeini PhD PhD, yesterday President Trump did a press conference in which he painted a picture of a US military effort that was very decisive and destructive and successful. He and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have emphasized that Iran is totally outmatched, that the US and Israel have military superiority over Iran. I mean, certainly that's true to an extent, but they're really painting a picture of this war being an inevitable victory for the US and Israel. And I get a sense that you have a very different understanding of the dynamics of this war and where things are heading. So what are President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth missing?

Well, first of all, I think that they had a very childish understanding of what Iran is as a state. Forget about the Islamic Republic, just Iran as a state and its capacities. Iran is a middle power. It is structurally ingrained, entrenched. It has industrial capacity. It has indigenous weaponry such as missiles and drones. It is one of the most advanced countries in in that regard. It does not have an air force of sorts to speak of, but it does, it did have some air defense. But that means that Iran was not the kind of, the impression that the United States had, especially the Trump administration, perhaps not all of the administration because there have been since leaks of US intel reports, National Intelligence Council, Pentagon, which very clearly said that this is not going to be a walk in the park. But the impression that I think was conveyed through the Israelis was that we can easily do the Venezuela operation in Iran. We can decapitate its leadership. The people don't like him very much. The regime is weak. And we are going to get another person that we can work with. And that person is going to capitulate to America's demands, which is to get rid of its missile technology or missile program, as well as its nuclear program. And the question that wasn't addressed was, well, there is a reason that they, knowing their capacities, you know, before the war, are willing to court this war and resist America. And knowing that they have resilience and that this is going to be a strategic problem and quagmire for the United States, It's going to change the dynamic. And for many Iranian strategists, you know, the sort of realist posture started to be advocated for, which is, you know, if we do not treat this as an existential war, if we continue with this kind of strategic patience or proportionality of, you know, tit-for-tat kind of war, as we did during a 12-day war, the war is never going to end. Every 3 months, 6 months, they're going to come and degrade our capabilities. So we are going to make a fundamental sort of last stand and change the rules of the game and change the perception in the United States that Iran is weak or a paper tiger. And I think that has been largely proven correct because immediately after the attack, and by the way, keep in mind that when President Trump comes out and says We are starting this special military operation, very much like how Vladimir Putin would call sort of a military operation as to avoid calling it a war. But then saying that we've done this and things are not going to look very good for them. In 24 hours, he comes out and says, well, maybe 4 weeks and 5 weeks of war.

So just a few days ago, or at the start of the war, the Israelis possibly and likely assisted by the United States and our intelligence, which we provide for them in every one of their wars. We assassinated the head of Shia Islam very provocatively on Ramadan. So we killed Supreme Leader Khomeini. He's now been replaced with his son, another Khomeini. So there's— we replaced one Khomeini with another. What should we expect from him? I mean, I've heard and I've read that he's a hardliner. He has closer ties to the military and intelligence establishment in Iran, and is less likely to negotiate with the United States, which, as we should remember, was what was happening before the United States and Israel began this war. Iran was negotiating with the United States, willing to provide us the best deal we've ever been offered in terms of nuclear enrichment. So what should we expect from their new Supreme Leader?

So I think you are absolutely correct in your sort of analysis of this. I think, first of all, when we attacked the Iranian Supreme Leader during their holy month of Ramadan, what ends up happening is we immediately turned him into a martyr for a lot of his supporters. So that created much more regime cohesion and rallying around the flag for the for the religious Iranians who do support the regime, but also the ones that maybe were critical of the regime, but now see an existential problem with the kind of attack that's been made, but also they see the kind of act as kind of against their own religious beliefs. And so very quickly, I think you got a rallying effect. You saw him being elevated and being called, in Persian, Imam al-Shahid, which is basically the martyred saint. So he left the sort of temporal plane and he became immediately sanctified in a very Catholic way. The Shiism is very similar to Christianity. Catholicism, if you want to think about it that way, for your audience. So, and immediately as well, there was this understanding of existentiality that was injected, which means that the regime, instead of the successor becoming pro-Western, I mean, there are neoliberal and liberal voices within the administration, and they would be they would be sort of open to negotiations with the West. Like, for example, the perfect example of someone like that would be Jawad Zarif, who did the negotiations with Obama the last time. So, but those voices got completely effectively sidelined, and you get a much more hardline Iranian leadership, even if it wasn't to be Khamenei's son. Now, Khamenei's son is notoriously embedded with the IRGC, He is known as a hardline, even within the hardliners. So, and you have managed to, basically we have managed to kill his entire family. So you're taking a hardliner who already does not believe that America and Iran are on the same sort of trajectory. We have basically gotten, we have taken that picture and we have radicalized it further. By killing the Iranian Supreme Leader in what is really, you know, I don't think it's, I think we need to be very aware of the implications of this as well. I'm not talking about international law, but in terms of like eliminating or decapitating heads of states, it's very different than killing terrorists. And the fact that this is normalized, it doesn't bode well for anybody. We basically acted as a, you know, eliminating leadership is what terrorists do to us and we do to terrorists. But this is— here you're talking about a head of state, a head of country. And so the implications will be vast and it's very different. But also, I think he will basically be seen as the leader of revenge rather than just a peacetime or even a wartime leader. So he is there to really show that the regime is doubling down instead of caving. So, so our action— I do not believe that was going to become the new Iranian Supreme Leader absent what happened, absent this attack. There might have been a hardline Supreme Leader, uh, and by the way, Khamenei was weak in the sense that he was actually ill. He was maybe 6 months, a year, uh, left to live. He was 86 years old. Um, he was, uh, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Again, He had done what he had to do. And at this point, him martyring himself was perhaps the biggest gift that he could give the Iranian regime and for resilience of the state. And so he did that. And also another aspect of this, which is very curious, is that out of that bombing, as you know, many military heads died. And as you know, Supreme Leader Khamenei died. But the only person that didn't die was Moshadegh Khamenei, who was in the same compound. He's still in the— in the hospital somewhere. So he's injured. And so from a theological perspective, from a clerical perspective, this was seen as an act of God and a miracle, not only to the symbolism of the Supreme Leader dying in Ramadan during a time in which also the head of the Shiites doctrine, the head of Shiite theology, which is Ali, the sort of husband of Prophet Muhammad's daughter has died, which there's a lot of like symbolism there. Not only that, not only the resistance angle, the resistance message of Khamenei is strengthened, but you also get this one son as the only person that has survived the attack. So they are claiming this to be an act of God and a miracle. So they're basically saying it doesn't really matter what even legally the criteria of leadership are. God has willed it that this person becomes the supreme leader to, you know, both to show the world our resilience, to show the continuity of the Iranian state, to galvanize a revenge or response. So he's going to be Islamic Republic's avenger now. And, but again, even if we, somehow manage to kill him next, you're not going to change this new kind of hardened anti-American mentality. Again, we talk a lot about the regime being completely anti-American, and there was a lot of anti-American rhetoric from the regime, especially at the onset with its founder. But I think over the years, this had become more rhetorical. They were trying to deal with America. There were elements that wanted to normalize relationships with America. With President Obama. They wanted to deal with President Trump. I think, Harrison, you were the one who mentioned, you know, the deal that they were about to give the president was something that was unheard of. They invited the United States to be an equal partner in Iranian nuclear program and, you know, make billions of dollars. So, I mean, it shows that for the regime in Iran, for the government structure in Iran, survivability is number one priority. And if that is threatened, then it's an all-out war. And I think that's where we are.

Yeah. One, and I'll plug an article that you wrote, a really good article called The Dangerous Martyrdom of Khomeini that you published in UnHerd, which pertains to this thing that you were just talking about, about how we made him a martyr and how the survival of his son kind of looks like a miracle. And this happened in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which gives it extra significance. I thought it was an extremely insightful piece and important for an American audience to be aware of these dynamics, which maybe are not so apparent to us naturally. I'll also say that the point that you made earlier about how, you know, the US is basically applying an Israeli model that Israel has done with militant groups of taking out their leaders, we're applying that, or I guess Israel, they did these strikes, but we gave them the intelligence, applying it to a state and taking out a state leader and indeed a religious leader. That same point has been made by Russian elites who definitely perceive that we're entering into some sort of new era of international politics and the rules are different and they have to adapt to it. I want to ask you a bit more about this issue of Iran's political resilience and the resilience of its government. So not just this mentality of the people, but actually of the political structures, because in that article that I mentioned, you talk about how the Iranian government is decentralized and hyper-institutionalized and horizontally organized. And how this makes it difficult to do the Venezuela thing, I guess, where we just pluck out one leader and put one in that we like, or we collapse the regime entirely. I'd like to hear you talk about that a little bit more in the context of what happens if the new Supreme Leader gets killed. And I'd also be interested to hear you talk about what happens if he doesn't get killed, because I could imagine, and I would assume that there's a kind of anti-hereditary monarchy thing in that Iranians have because of the memory of the Shah. So is he going to face any kind of political resistance or rift within the governing structure because of that?

First of all, no. Even if we kill the next leadership and we want to decapitate the next person and try to intimidate them into accepting our sort of terms of the war, I do not think that will work, partly because the Islamic Republic is, is not just a regime, but it also is representing the Iranian state. And the Iranian state over decades has become a modern total state, which means that it is deeply entrenched. It has various economic industrial tools. It has parallel networks. It is comparable to totalitarian states like China or Soviet Union. So it's not going to be dislodged through military action or even through popular resistance in that way. It can only be dislodged through elite defections and elite decision-making to change the structure of the regime itself. I do not see either a domestic revolution or an outside sort of war dislodging the Iranian state because the Iranian state has you know, through the Pahlavi time, through the pre-Islamic Revolution time, and also in this, during the Islamic Republic, become more and more modern and modernized. And that means that it has, again, all the tools that you would expect the United States, Russia, or China would have. They're not like a small, you know, vertical pyramid structure in which if you decapitate the head, the whole regime falls. They're not personalistic, they're systemic. And so I think that is something that will continue to linger. The one thing that the Israelis want to do is to basically create state collapse in Iran and Syrianize Iran to be able to keep it weakened in front of all of this challenges that the Islamic Republic will face domestically and otherwise to basically create a situation of a domestic civil war to make sure that Iran is bogged down in its own problems so that it cannot project power. But it's not really about the regime. It's about the state. And that's what I try to emphasize here from the Israeli perspective.

And do you think Mujtaba'a Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader, will face any kind of internal rift from people who didn't want him to be Supreme Leader because they don't want this hereditary lineage thing?

So there is a lot of action. There's a lot of movements already to try to say, you know, Mojtaba Khamenei has been elected through the Assembly of Experts, therefore it's not a hereditary monarchy. He's only being elected because he is still the most able or the best option today. Yes, there is a lot of internal kind of, let's say it's internally frowned upon that he was the son of the last Supreme Leader, but because of the wartime situation and the needs for status quo and continuity, I think a lot of people are willing to close their eyes on this and basically say it's an emergency situation and it requires an emergency measure. That's why I say without the war, We would've probably gotten someone that was more moderate. That's not to say that the IRGC would not have more power in this third phase of the Islamic Republic, but at least the face of the regime would've been more moderate than what we will see, I think. And I think as a result of this, and as a result of the asymmetric warfare that Iran is conducting, America will be forced to leave the region much more quickly than it would've had otherwise. And that would mean that Iran will, you know, we have basically made this Eurasian alliance that we kept talking about, which was not a real thing. Like, Iran has its own national interests. Russia had its own national interests. China, the same way. But because of our sort of mutual threat across various domains, various theaters, Ukraine and Russia, Israel with Iran. And, you know, even Chinese perspectives are changing in respect to we need to make sure that Iran doesn't fall. So we have created a situation in which there's mutual desire for increasing alignment, deepening alignments between China, Iran, and Russia. And that is the unfortunate impact or implication of this sort of ill-advised policy of going to war with Iran, which would have been, irrespective of its tactical successes, it's going to be a strategic disaster for the administration, I think for America and the region.

When it comes to the ongoing regional war, even if the United States wanted an off-ramp, as was suggested yesterday when Trump said, "We're almost done possibly," or something along those lines. I'm paraphrasing. It's not really up to us, as many people have pointed out. I mean, the Iranians have said that they don't want a ceasefire, and they said so, I guess, yesterday or on Monday, so when this comes out, 2 days ago. They said that the Americans and the Israelis have to pay a price for what they've done. What sort of price do you think that will be?

So this is a very important question. I think the Americans, especially the Israelis, had this model of, you know what, we are going to go in, we are going to attack Iran, we're going to degrade their missile capabilities, we are going to go in anytime we want. And, you know, because Iran can no longer use, let's say, Hezbollah or its proxy forces, it's sort of what's called the forward presence to threaten us. If we can only make sure that not enough missiles get to us, we can just go in every 3, 6 months and degrade them and weaken Iran and come out of that on top. Iran has recognized that, and it has made a line in the sand that no matter what, this war will not end until Iran decides that it will end by showing that there's no war coming. They want to make sure that the shadow of war will be lifted from Iran because that shadow of war itself has made life for Iran basically impossible or very hard. People are, basically economically, you're having problems. You can't go to work necessarily. Like, you know, everything is disrupted because there is this threat that there's going to be war like next month or this month. So at some point, the Iranians said, you know what, let's just have this war and show that we are not this, you know, paper tiger as the president of the United States believes them to be, and also show that it's impossible to use force to change our behavior. And As a result of that, they have, you know, they have studied the American doctrine of military strategy. They have looked at what their own capabilities are, and they are running a perfect asymmetric campaign. They have focused immediately on widening the war, on creating a regional war for the United States, attacking everywhere that the United States is. They keep hitting US bases in the region. In Kuwait, our US bases are basically decimated. In the Fifth Fleet in Manama in Bahrain is under a lot of attack, and specifically their logistical hubs and their communication centers, and thirdly, their satellites. So these satellites are used to track and do the early warning systems through what's called the radomes and radars, and also the THAAD systems. To basically track Iranian missiles and ballistics, ballistic missiles that are going to Israel and other places, and to try to intercept them. So during the 12-day war, Iran figured out that it can actually outlast, you know, that its missiles will cause us to use a lot of our interceptors. So therefore, this is unsustainable, and both physically and materially, but also economically, because let's say Iranian drones cost $20,000, $30,000. Our Patriot missiles or our THAAD systems are anywhere between about $400,000, $500,000 to upwards of $2 million. So this is unsustainable over a long term. And also we don't produce enough, partly because we haven't focused on domestic capacity for a long time in the United States. And today, as you might have heard, We actually had to bring another THAAD system from Korea to the region. And we're also asking for a different, a third aircraft carrier, George W. Bush, to come to the region. So ultimately what we are doing is we think that we can defend the skies of Israel and keep attacking Iran. But the Iranian program this time around has been to use a few, you know, use, relatively lower number of ballistic missiles to get us, get our air defenses going, and then using its drones, its Shahed drones and other drones, especially Shahed drones, to hit the radar and reconnaissance aspects of US defense, air defense. And so now Iran sees itself at a position where it can ultimately, the other side's munitions and interceptors are running low, and that would be the ultimate deterrent. So that's why I don't see Iran backing down at this point, because it has— the war is extremely costly to Iran. Let's not forget that. I mean, Iranian infrastructure, you know, oil refineries in Tehran, let's say, what else, the sort of electric grid in Tehran and Karaj, they have been hit. Big cities are being hit. Missile, you know, missile capability is being hit. Nuclear sites are being hit. So Iran is paying this huge cost to get to the point where it can actually use its advanced, more advanced missiles, the third and fourth generation, that is much more accurate and has a high payload against Israel, and basically do what they have threatened, which is to flatten Israel. Now Iran has that deterrence in the next few days. And so Iran is not going to back down until the American side understands that that its strategy has failed, that Iranian missile defense and its capability is not going to be eliminated, let's say, in spite of what P-Tech said, says, you know, 90% of Iranian launchers are destroyed. First of all, most of these new generation launchers are underground. These missile cities are underground. There are many of them that we don't know where they are. We only know the missile cities that we detected the first time around during the 12-day war. Iran has a lot of cards that it hasn't played. And another thing is that when you're talking about a state like this, a systemic state, and especially a systemic state that is ideological, the lives of the people are expendable, including the lives of the population, but also the lives of leadership itself. So that's very important. It's not just that these are These are not the kind of tyrannical regimes that only kill their own people. Their leadership are willing to die for the cause. And the cause here though is not some sort of like, you know, Islamicizing the world, is actually surviving the state. And that's what I mean. The state, once it's built, once the state is developed, whether it's in Moscow or in Beijing or in Tehran, these kinds of modern states, or in Washington, They're highly bureaucratic, they have deep state networks, and they will do anything to ensure their power and sustainability and endurance and resilience. And so this is something that I think especially those of us who are talking to conservatives, I think conservatives have always warned about total states and power of states that are so dominant and control everything. I think that is very, very clear in in the rise of these kinds of states. And, you know, America has it too. I mean, if you eliminate our head of state, American state will continue. So it is as preposterous for us to think that their states will fall, uh, and, you know, think that, you know, Iran has a situation like Libya or Iraq in 2003. Now, the chaos that it will cause in the region, it's, it's a real chaos. And another impact is the effect on our allies other than Israel in the region. I mean, they brought us in and hosted US bases for security. Instead, their entire economic model, which is based on neoliberal economic development that depends on peace and stability and security, is down the drain. All Iran needs to do is to throw a few or send them a few drones, and they have done so. And you're seeing the entire economic order in the Gulf is coming to a halt. So, The American force posture is created to fight a great power war with Soviet Union. It is not designed to fight an asymmetric war. Iran knows it, and it's pushing that leverage to create high economic, regional, and political costs, which will translate into a strategic victory. And it will ultimately mean that the United States has to pull back from the region.

Yeah. So what you're saying kind of makes me worry about some sort of escalation doom spiral. I can totally understand why Iran is doing this. I understand their strategic logic. They want to impose costs sufficient to ensure that there's not just a repeat of this war and that the US and Israel know they can't do this again. And so the world, because it's just experienced this economic crisis, you know, pushes back on US and Israel if they try to do this again. And the Gulf states certainly do because they're supposed to be like a haven of security in the Middle East. And if you've got drones going into Dubai, you know, that, that doesn't work anymore. But, but I don't know that Trump and, you know, the White House are too eager to get out of this war on Iran's terms. Obviously, Trump wants to look tough. He does have a tendency, or at least an ability, to kind of weasel out of things and to frame things as a victory, even though it's— even when it's a little ambiguous whether he actually won. But as Harry was hinting earlier, you know, it's not really up to Trump, right? Even if the US pulled out of the war, Israel could continue the war. Iran could continue to attack Gulf states and Israel, and then we would just get sucked back in, at least to defend them. Um, so what do you think is the most plausible and feasible way out of this war? How does this end in something other than the US and Israel just trying to absolutely obliterate Iran indefinitely?

Unfortunately, I think that is one option or one trajectory that we are on. I do not even, as I see it, either Donald Trump looks at the situation, you know, goes back to his better instincts against war, against destruction, and, you know, shuns Lindsey Graham and Mark Levin, the champions and cheerleaders of this war, and says, you know, you misled me. You made me not listen to my own Pentagon, ignore Dan Cain. And so, yeah, this is not going to work out. And he's going to say, we completely achieved what we wanted to. We bombed them. We killed their leadership. So why not? We're done. And I think even there is really analysts who say, you know what? We can't sustain a war absent the United States. But the other possibility is that The United States is, could escalate through Israel or by itself to tactical nukes as this one last sort of Hail Mary of trying to get Iran to capitulate. I don't think it's going to work. I think Iran has even anticipated that scenario. So I just think it's a disaster all around.

Would they do like a demonstration nuke out in the desert? Or you're imagining they'll like nuke Tehran?

Or no, I think either a demonstration or a small, like you know, a small town that's closer to, let's say, the nuclear sites or something like that, like in Natanz or in central Iran. Not a strategic nuke, but a tactical nuke, which is basically closer to what Hiroshima was with that kind of level of leveling, let's say. But Iran has a contingency. Iran has weapons, missiles that are going to hit Dimona. Reactor. It doesn't have nuclear weapons, but it's going to create a nuclear catastrophe for Israel. And just, you know, that is its sort of second strike option. But again, this is, we need to step back and think about again, why are we here in the first place? I think that is a very important question not asked. I think there are a lot of people who are like, well, what does Benjamin Netanyahu have over Donald Trump? I don't think it's as simple as that kind of blackmail. I think it's something that Israel has done for a long time. I think we should look at the nuclear blackmail option, which has been done over and over again. Israel is the only country in the region that has nuclear weapons, which means that it has nuclear monopoly. And it has now has the desire for the Greater Israel Project, which is basically regional supremacy, right? Those are the two, that's what it has and that's what it wants. So in '73, when it was attacked, as the, you know, and it was being, its conventional forces were being pushed back, Nixon had a choice to make. Let Israel deal with its own enemies by itself or intervene. The Israelis threatened that they will use nuclear weapons against the Arabs, Israelis and Syrians during that war. That changed US calculus. And I think it put us on a trajectory that we're seeing today. The United States back then basically started this model of we are going to come to Israel's defense, not offense, but defense, with overwhelming conventional force to change the dynamic of its wars. And at the time, it was about Israeli security, not Israeli ambition. So that was another aspect of it. But we basically said, okay, we're not going to see if Israel is going to be, you know, we're not going to call Israel's bluff. We're actually going to you know, help with its security and its defense. That '73 model, we saw a repeat of it during the 12-Day War. Israel wanted to go to— we also saw it during Biden, during the earlier rounds of this. So the United States and the US administrations have consistently said, if you attack another country, you're on your own, but if you don't attack them, or if they attack you back, we'll defend you. And it's part of the same calculus of the sort of the Nixonian shift based on nuclear blackmail. Something changed during the 12-day war, in my view, and that's the realization in Washington and Tel Aviv or Jerusalem that Iran has enough ballistic missiles capable of outlasting America's air defense so that even us, even we can't defend Israeli skies any longer. So if the war keeps going more than 2 weeks, Israel can be flattened. And that created a new calculus of, well, let's go on the offense. And now Israel says, I'm going to use, let's say, nuclear weapons if you don't come in. Basically, in a sense, if America doesn't go in, the belief system in Washington becomes something like this. They're going to do this tit for tat. It's going to escalate. Israel is going to use nuclear weapons. And we don't want that. That was the original sort of thinking. So then the question is, what are we going to do about it? Let's go on offense was basically, I think, the Trump logic and help them eliminate the Iranian deterrence once and for all so we don't have this nuclear scenario. Obviously, that hasn't worked and it won't work. And so the idea that we can have Israeli hegemony as a sole hegemon in the region based on our American weaponry and protecting or maintaining or persisting with this nuclear monopoly, the very action that we took, I think, practically guarantees that other countries in the region will try to nuclearize. And by the way, this was something that Nixon believed that should happen. He tried to encourage, you know, the peace deal that he made with Anwar Sadat was giving them a peaceful nuclear program, but it was designed to create a sort of parity in the region because Kissinger and Nixon really understood that if you don't have nuclear parity, America will be sucked back in. And at that time, especially during the Cold War, the Soviet Union was expected to come back in. That was the doomsday scenario that Kissinger and Nixon wanted to avoid. So they encouraged the Shah to, to move further on its nuclear program, and they also offered Egypt a peaceful nuclear program. And these peaceful nuclear programs, if you have reactors and if you start having your own enrichment, end up giving you dual-use technology that you can develop a nuclear weapon with. So that would have been our guarantee against the blackmail of Israel. So today we are having this situation in which, in a way, nothing has changed. We did the offensive action, we made it more likely for Iran to nuclearize in the medium term, and, and Israel still, uh, is basically threatening nuclear action if we leave. And that's a situation that no American president should ever find itself in ever again. So I just do not see this. This basically infringes on American sovereignty through nuclear blackmail. I think this is a big deal. And I think the result of this, one result of this war, is a reassessment of Iranian, of American-Israeli relationship, the special relationship. Just because it's unsustainable for us to bankroll and support defensively and now offensively Israel's wars. And finally, this kind of very dangerous situation of one side having escalation dominance and nobody else can do anything about it is going to get us to a nuclear war that nobody wants, maybe other than some, you know, benghui or some Israeli radicals. I don't even think Netanyahu himself might. I think he might want to avoid a nuclear war himself because again, the Iranian missiles, even if you don't need to use nuclear weapons, this is what the Israelis don't realize. The Iranians don't need to use nuclear weapons to flatten Israel. Israel is very tiny. So all they need is to send 50 of their conventional ballistic missiles and it will flatten Israel conventionally. The goal of destruction has been achieved. So that's why the Iranian missile defense technology or program is such a big deal all of a sudden during these conversations. But it's something that the United States has to accept, I think, because there is no reason for Iran to— first of all, I think the Iranian leadership would even accept a non-aggression pact with Israel. If it's guaranteed that there will be no more wars. And I think it's in the United States' benefit or interest to accept that Iran has some deterrence capability that will make sure that, you know, these kinds of wars will end and we don't have to be involved in it so much. So I'll stop there, but I think I try to, you know, put a different picture here on this.

No, no, I agree with a lot of what you said. Actually, before the war started, I wrote an article called War with Iran is the Opposite of Realism, in which I made some similar points, and I suggested that the risk of nuclear use would actually be higher in this war than in other conflicts that we've seen. But I do think that that brings us to the end of this episode. I want to thank our listeners for listening until the end and remind them they can watch these episodes on YouTube. And I want to thank you, Harry, and of course you, Arta Moeini PhD, for the very illuminating discussion. Thank you.