Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / BLOCKADE COUNTDOWN: What's the End Game?

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BLOCKADE COUNTDOWN: What's the End Game? · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  What led to my mind when a blockade was announced is that it would have been the logical place to begin the war.
• 0:12
  Gay humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:17
  Well, we all have many dangerous and uncomfortable questions about the end game of the blockade and the war in Iran.
• 0:25
  Last week, it seemed like the end may have been in sight with a two-week ceasefire.
• 0:31
  Then, talks in Pakistan between the US Vice President and the Iranians went nowhere and President Trump suddenly imposed a blockade of the Straits of Hormuz.
• 0:41
  That went into effect on Monday and US forces say that they have now completely halted all economic trade going into and out of Iran by sea.
• 0:53
  Iran's armed forces say they'll retaliate if the blockade continues.
• 0:57
  Where does the escalation lead? Does President Trump have anything left up his sleeve?
• 1:03
  What exit ramps are there for either side?
• 1:06
  I wanted answers to all these questions and more, and the perfect man to offer them is Steven Sinan, who served in the US State Department.
• 1:14
  He specialized in Middle East and counterterrorism, policy, and President Clinton's National Security Council.
• 1:21
  President Obama then brought him back into the White House to serve as the NSC's senior director for the Middle East and North Africa.
• 1:28
  So he has some pedigree. He's a leading world expert on Iran.
• 1:33
  In 2011, he co-wrote a book called The Sixth Crisis Iran, Israel, America, and the Rumors of War.
• 1:39
  He was certainly ahead of his time on that one.
• 1:42
  His most recent book is called Grand Delusion, The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East.
• 1:49
  He joined me to discuss the logic of Trump's blockade, or perhaps the illogic of a blockade at this stage of a conflict.
• 1:56
  And what 30 years of shaping US policy in the Middle East has taught him about how this conflict is likely to end.
• 2:04
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one the only Steven Sinan.
• 2:09
  Steven, where are we at the moment? How should we understand the blockade?
• 2:20
  A couple of ways to understand the blockade would let to my mind when the blockade was announced as the latest departure in American policy was that other things being equal, it would have been the logical place to begin the war.
• 2:37
  The first step is you blockaded Iran and then you sort of take it from there.
• 2:42
  And the way in which US war plans have been constructed over the past decades, really, regarding Iran, that would have more or less been the first step.
• 2:57
  Or perhaps the first step would have been surgical strikes against Iranian nuclear installations or something like that.
• 3:06
  Arguably that was the first step. It was just eight months ago.
• 3:09
  But it was eight months ago and then they sort of let it drop kind of astonishingly.
• 3:16
  But in any case, they've now gotten around to what most strategists would have taken as the logical first step.
• 3:26
  But we'll see if it works.
• 3:28
  And you're saying it would be the first step so that you would still have some firepower to escalate to that you don't want to start going all out and then retreat to a blockade because ultimately like what are you threatening them?
• 3:43
  Is that the thinking like you want to escalate?
• 3:46
  Yes, very much so. We're on the same page here. That's exactly the point.
• 3:51
  I mean, you want to leave yourself headroom for escalation.
• 3:56
  You know, you always need to be holding something of the enemies, something of the enemies hostage.
• 4:06
  So you need to be able to carve out space for yourself to increase pressure to ratchet up to pressure on your adversary.
• 4:16
  And that, by the way, not gives your adversary off ramp opportunities, but it also gives yourself off ramp opportunities.
• 4:27
  And typically that would be the way in which the US war plans envisaged the conflict to play out.
• 4:36
  What the administration did this time around was to essentially take the war plan and invert it so that their first step in the war was where the war would typically end.
• 4:55
  And according to the vision of the US war plan.
• 5:00
  I suppose for the hawks, especially Israeli hawks who are operating on a different calculus, the argument against escalating that way would be, well, then you're just giving them an indication that it's time for them to all go into hiding, hide their new climaterials.
• 5:16
  You know, build as many drones as they possibly can, you want to go hard as fast as you can catch them by surprise and see what happens.
• 5:25
  Yeah, that would have been their argument, but their argument would have been a little more elaborated than that.
• 5:34
  And so far as it would have included the proposition.
• 5:37
  I believe you're applying that the foreign policy professionals would have a more sophisticated argument than me, a podcaster.
• 5:42
  But I'll take, I won't take offense.
• 5:44
  If I created that impression, I apologize who's entirely unattended.
• 5:49
  But here's a thing.
• 5:54
  The Israeli's and Americans believed that this is what's been reported anyway.
• 6:01
  And it sounds completely reasonable given, given events.
• 6:05
  The Israeli's and Americans actually expected that first devastating blow to crack the regime.
• 6:16
  So it wasn't just a matter of, well, we don't want to give these guys a chance to hide by giving them warning or a chance to make into the five drones, because we've given them another five minutes to figure out what's coming.
• 6:31
  But rather a strong belief at work in Washington and certainly as reported about the meeting between Netanyahu and Trump in the White House situation room.
• 6:46
  The expectation was that the forecast was that this devastating blow would crack the regime.
• 6:55
  But I mean the same logic would apply against a strategy of escalation then as well, because if the regime is likely to fall, if you can instantaneously take out its top dozen people, then if they all go into hiding while you're running a blockade.
• 7:11
  Well, you know, in the way that the war plants were conceived, the greatest danger, the greatest threat that you could present your enemy with is the destruction of his government and his control over the country.
• 7:31
  Now, there was never a guarantee that when you got to that step, it would actually work.
• 7:38
  But the thinking was that that was the most threatening thing that you could put out there for the other side to digest and decide in turn how they were going to deal with your demands.
• 7:58
  Here, if they started as they did with the worst possible threat, then if it didn't work, there was nowhere to go, which is why you had this bizarre situation of the only escalation path for the United States being the threat of genocide.
• 8:24
  You know, in the form of Donald Trump's threat to end Iranian civilization in a single night and in a way that Iran would not be able to recover.
• 8:38
  And a moment ago, Stephen, you said we'll see if the blockade works. What does that mean? What would working mean?
• 8:47
  So, yeah, trying to put myself in the administration shoes here. I think what they would say is, well, if we have an airtight blockade of Iranian ports both on the Indian Ocean and in the Persian Gulf, they can't bring in any goods and they can't export oil.
• 9:10
  They can't, there's just no revenue available. Then it would be only a matter of time and probably a short while before the Iranians would have to surrender.
• 9:24
  And it would be done in a way that posed the least possible risk to American interests because if you design the blockade in the right way, then oil traffic from the Gulf to the Indian Ocean and then around to the Suez Canal, that would be unimpeded.
• 9:47
  So, the only country that would suffer from the blockade would be the targeted country. And all the other states, well, yeah, no problem. The Saudis, they could pump in and translate as much oil as they wanted, the Iraqis, the Kuwaitis.
• 10:03
  Sorry, but that assumes that Iran has no capacity to cause mischief in the strait, which is precisely the reason why we have to have the blockade in the first place.
• 10:16
  For people not watching the video, Stephen is comically grabbing his face as if this is a shock and a surprise.
• 10:25
  By golly, you do have a point there. Yeah, that's the downside.
• 10:32
  Right. I mean, it seems to be the fatal floor in the sense that the blockade, you know, the starving Iran until it has no other option, but to surrender assumes that Iran has no other cards to play.
• 10:44
  As long as Iran has a capacity to put a missile through the window of five star hotels in Dubai and, you know, blow up petrochemical plants and gastrofineries in Qatar and, you know, Bahrain.
• 11:04
  Then you know, it's that those would, if I was in Tehran, those would be my first steps. I mean, I would put out my truth social post, you know, on the eve of the end of the blockade or whatever the deadline is saying in 48 hours, you know, drone swarm is going to hit this gastrofinery and this golf state and then 48 hours after that it's going to be somewhere else and then 48 hours after that it's going to be somewhere else and that's going to continue until until the blockade ends.
• 11:32
  If I got really desperate, I mean, my first thing would not be to say, okay, you guys win.
• 11:41
  To be sure, I mean, this is what the blockade does is restart the war as it was playing out before the blockade because the blockade will incite an Iranian response and that Iranian response will necessitate
• 12:01
  a counter response from the United States and its allies and then you're in this escalatory spiral and it just gets really messy as messy as it was before Donald Trump decided to, you know, to embrace the momentary taco that he's
• 12:24
  the Trump always chickening out principle. Yeah, I mean, Stephen, the messiness is not by itself fatal if you have a strategy that ends in you winning, but you wrote a piece five you published a piece five or six weeks ago early in the war in addition to a piece in the economist at the very start of the war in which you were saying that the most precious commodity in all of this is not aircraft.
• 12:54
  Carriers and missiles and drones, it's time. Why is that?
• 13:03
  Well, you know, time is essentially a commodity and, you know, you can use it or you can waste it and the the Iranians are making better use of time than the Americans.
• 13:26
  And part because just to revert back to the earlier part of our conversation, the US didn't want to take time or use time. This is why they started with this.
• 13:41
  What they thought would be a game ending blow. They were looking for something instantaneous and when they didn't get that, the advantage shifted to the side that understood the value of time and was better prepared to make use of it.
• 14:01
  Now, I think at this point, both sides would probably say, if asked, that they have time on their side. The Iranians believe that they have time on their side and Trump seems to believe that he has time on his side.
• 14:22
  Because the midterm elections in the United States, which are very important elections, especially this year, 2026, don't happen until November.
• 14:33
  That, as a practical matter, gives the administration, I would say at least until September, at least until Labor Day, which is a holiday at the beginning of September in the United States, to wind this up.
• 14:48
  Because at that point, between the beginning of September and election day, there's just plenty of time for people to forget, if all's well, that ended well.
• 15:02
  So, the administration may be thinking they've got some time to play with here. And during that time, they could make life so miserable for the Iranians that the Iranians will crack first.
• 15:15
  But the Iranians are taking a very different view. The Iranians believe that whether through pure stasis or escalation, inadvertent or otherwise,
• 15:30
  economic conditions going to violence in the Gulf will make life worse for Americans and for Republicans, generally, than Iran can possibly be damaged.
• 15:47
  So, Iran, just to elaborate on this, just for one second, Iran has two economies. Iran has a civilian economy, sort of an open economy that is being severely punished by this crisis.
• 16:02
  There's a question about it. But it has a war economy that operates in parallel and is managed by the Revolutionary Guard Corps, you know, the key player, really, in Iranian politics.
• 16:17
  The one who can make decisions that no one can question. And the issue is in Iran, not whether, you know, there's some electorate that's going to really be bothered by shortages and economic punishment and put pressure on the government to change course.
• 16:40
  That's not the situation in Iran. In Iran, the guys who call the shots, I have a lot of time to work with. None of this, none of what's going on hurts them, particularly. In fact, they're only strengthened by these kinds of stresses.
• 17:03
  In the United States, very different story. And this is a, these midterm elections, the upcoming elections will be pivotal in shaping the options that the executive branch has under Donald Trump to shape life in the United States, really.
• 17:26
  For the next few years and exposes him, if the Democrats win the Senate, which is a possibility, but not a foregone conclusion, exposes the president to real risk of impeachment and conviction.
• 17:42
  Don't you need 60 votes to convict?
• 17:46
  Well, I don't remember. I'm not sure that's true. I buy business.
• 17:51
  Well, the thing is, the Republicans, it's widely believed by political analysts that the Republicans will take a terrible beating in the House of Representatives, the lower house in the American bicameral system.
• 18:14
  The only about a third of the Senate is up for reelection, which limits the exposure of Republicans to sort of comprehensive defeat of the sort that they might well experience in the House.
• 18:30
  So I'm not, I'm not predicting a fatal reversal of fortune for for Donald Trump, but it's something he has to worry about.
• 18:42
  If the United States voters, American voters, go to the polls in November and gas is $4.50 a gallon.
• 18:57
  You have an SUV and it costs you $100 to fill up your tank. That would be very uncomfortable.
• 19:09
  Yes, and even if it's not going to lead to Trump's removal from office by being impeached and convicted, it's going to make him very annoyed to have Republican lawmakers calling him and knocking on his office door every single minute of the day and night, say with air on fire, saying, what the hell is going on?
• 19:25
  What are you doing? You're killing us here. Get the hell out.
• 19:28
  Not to mention, of course, the global implications. I don't expect the Trump administration to give a shit about any of its allies, but in Europe where they import all of their natural gas and in Australia, where we import our diesel and around the world in terms of fertilizer.
• 19:44
  People are extremely worried about the consequences of not having oil and coming out of the straight of hormones. It would be a lot trickier than just.
• 19:57
  It will become not just a pricing problem, but a problem of people waiting in very, very long lines or even not being able to get essential items before too long and how long the globe has patience for that while we wait for Iran to feel sufficient pain to surrender is the question.
• 20:20
  How were you feeling when the blockade began, Stephen, because I felt relieved that Trump chickened out again and I thought, all right, he'll do this two week window of a ceasefire.
• 20:32
  And then at the end of it, he'll give the Iranians what they want and they'll probably be better off than they were before the war.
• 20:39
  And maybe they'll end up with some sort of version of the Obama nuclear deal and Trump will claim it as a victory and go home.
• 20:48
  Then I'm a bit confused about how the blockade is not an over rejection of the ceasefire since we were supposedly going to have two weeks of open traffic through the straight anyway.
• 21:01
  And what the end game now is, are you confident that the negotiator and chief has any idea of strategy here?
• 21:14
  No, I don't think any of this is really thought through. It's not a matter of whether it's been well thought through.
• 21:23
  I'm not really sure that anybody is thinking about this.
• 21:27
  The first of all, blockade is, as the lawyers in your audience will know is an active war.
• 21:37
  Right, but that I've always found that a little bit arcane because that horse has bolted hasn't that like, you know, we're definitely a war.
• 21:44
  Well, yes, but see the thing is if you say you have a ceasefire and virtually the first thing you do in the ceasefire is to embark on an active war in the form of a blockade, it raises the question of what you thought the ceasefire signified anyway.
• 22:02
  What you thought to begin with it, Matt, it would have made sense and this is where, I mean, I think your points are really well taken.
• 22:11
  This is where it would have made sense for the administration to go into this blockade as a kind of sort of fiction that would enable it to extract a few concessions from the Iranians that would have enabled the administration then to declare victory.
• 22:31
  And what those concessions would have been were easy to imagine because all you have to do is imagine the deal that was in the works before the United States and Israel started the war several weeks ago.
• 22:54
  When, at that point, negotiators mediated by the Omanis in Geneva had come up with what looked like a reasonably good deal.
• 23:10
  And as one, as you framed it, that would have been better than what Obama got.
• 23:19
  And that should have been very satisfying to Trump.
• 23:25
  But anyway, they didn't go for that. And now what looks like in this case, they've asked the Iranians for very sweeping concessions of the sort that the Iranians are not going to jump on.
• 23:40
  It's not going to be very appetizing for them.
• 23:43
  And if the demands that were made at the negotiation in Islamabad, I'm not really sure it was an negotiation, but the session, the talking session in Islamabad, if the demands were what they were purported to be.
• 24:04
  They could well see in advance the Iranians turning down the opportunity to make the administration happy and the hope of getting the break they wanted.
• 24:19
  Also, as you pointed out, it was supposed to be a two week grace period.
• 24:28
  And it's really difficult to wrap one's mind around how a two week grace period of the sort that the parties were supposed to have agreed to.
• 24:40
  How that is compatible with the blockade that's announced almost immediately.
• 24:46
  It was especially since the war thing that Iran was supposed to contribute to the two week grace period was the opening of the straight.
• 24:53
  That's what is weird about it to me.
• 24:55
  Like you get them to open the straight, which is the main pressure point that they have.
• 24:59
  Why don't you wait 13 days and see what happens? And then on the 13th day, you say if you don't agree to our demands or to whatever our final offer in these negotiations is,
• 25:10
  then you go back to blockading the straight, then it'll be a two way blockade, not just a one way blockade.
• 25:15
  And none of your ships will come out or go in either. And then again, you've got a bargaining chip after at least you've been able to store up another two weeks worth of oil exports in the meantime.
• 25:26
  So there's less pain for you at the pump.
• 25:30
  It does not leave one. Well, I can hope is that his history of real estate negotiating gives him some insight that I don't have into how to place pressure points on people you're negotiating with.
• 25:44
  But the New York real estate scene is really a bit different.
• 25:51
  That's the other statement of the podcast.
• 25:57
  And as the, you know, into a marriage of the Trump and Kushner families shows, I mean, there's really just a real estate cartel and there's some, you know, squabbling.
• 26:16
  You know, for a share of the spoils within the cartel, but it's not as though there's the equivalent of a real estate Iran and real estate America where there are.
• 26:26
  There's a deep history of animosity and deep ideological differences and deep strategic differences.
• 26:33
  There isn't any of that. So in the real estate market in New York City, you could, you know, the art of the deal really only amounts to posturing.
• 26:48
  You know, it's like professional wrestling on television in the United States where, you know, the, the two guys who are interchangeable, you know, are put into the ring and they throw each other around and then, you know, at some point, it's agreed that the guy in the red trunks is going to win.
• 27:10
  And, you know, the both fighters walk off with, you know, some money and that said, it's all basically kabuki.
• 27:20
  But that's, if there's one thing that the US Iranian relationship is not, it's kabuki.
• 27:31
  I mean, it's not kabuki in the sense that it's not preordained the way that a professional wrestling match is prewritten.
• 27:40
  But to some extent, can't the, you know, Trumpist foreign policy person say essentially all diplomacy is a kind of kabuki because it is a kind of bluster and bluff.
• 27:52
  And when you say that you're going to wipe out an entire civilization and blow up all of their desalination plants and bridges and power plants and then they reopen, they agreed to reopen the straight for two weeks.
• 28:04
  That is them responding to your bluster.
• 28:14
  Okay, let me, let me, let me take this. I think it's an important question, okay, which is what, what is diplomacy exactly and what differentiates diplomacy from warfare or from, you know, New York real estate marketing, you know, bluster and posturing.
• 28:40
  The differentiating factor, it seems to me, is searching carefully for common ground with your adversary and getting to that common ground at the least possible cost to yourself.
• 29:05
  And a lot of times that's a very tricky and sometimes it doesn't work out and, and the conflict driving the diplomatic process devils to violence that, of course, you know, happens.
• 29:23
  But diplomacy is designed for the most part to avoid armed conflict and, and get you what you want without having to accept the costs and risks of war.
• 29:37
  That's not what's going on here.
• 29:42
  Here, at least on the U.S. side, you had an administration that was looking forward to the war. I mean, this is, this is, you know, been very clearly reported, you know, out of the situation room meeting that Trump had with, with Netanyahu.
• 30:04
  And interestingly, the Trump zone administration was divided, at least so they wish to appear in retrospect, was divided in that some of them didn't accept Israeli claims about the miraculous curative powers of, you know, colossal violence.
• 30:31
  And that, you know, seemed to have really appealed to Donald Trump, but not so much to his intelligence community, his secretary of state or his vice president.
• 30:45
  But it really appealed to Trump, and you do not, I mean, he is pretty clearly a kick them when they're down kind of guy, and he likes to talk as he has about using violence or force against opponents.
• 31:03
  You know, Australian viewers might be unaware of the way in which Trump has, you know, rather, you know, flamboyantly engaged in this kind of rhetoric.
• 31:18
  And I wish it were the case that being non-American was sufficient to insulate one from Trump's antics. Sadly, that ship has long sailed, my friend.
• 31:29
  Well, there you go. So, you know, there is, there is that side of Trump and Netanyahu knew that he was going to be pushing on an open door when he, when he outlined this, this plan for a devastating blow and an immediate resort to violence.
• 31:47
  And so, I think, well, I look, I was just going to, you know, venture some, I don't know, some speculative thoughts about what, what happened, you know, inside the mind of the president.
• 32:02
  Please, speculate away.
• 32:04
  Well, and his inner councils when, when JD Vance came back from the small mod and said, well, we, we told the Iranians that the only way out of this wasn't for them to lick the floor.
• 32:18
  And, and they chose not to do it.
• 32:21
  And, you know, that was made somehow a negotiation.
• 32:27
  Vance said, well, the Iranians did not accept our terms.
• 32:33
  And, and it must have been presented to the president in a way that led him to think, well, what's the point in waiting two weeks?
• 32:48
  Because we would have made the same demands two weeks from now, as, as we made in that marathon negotiating session, from which JD Vance just returned.
• 33:02
  So, so what can we do that doesn't entail an immediate return to bombing targets in Iran?
• 33:14
  And, and the targets were running out anyway, which is, which is why the administration was indulging in this apocalyptic kind of talk because all the military targets had been pretty much pulverized.
• 33:34
  The, the, the, between the United States and Israel, that's a lot of firepower.
• 33:40
  And, and a very high sortie rate.
• 33:44
  I mean, the, the Israelis control the skies, which means that, you know, they're in a position to refuel, you know, their aircraft, you know, constantly without fear of their tankers being shot down or anything like that.
• 33:59
  The United States is launching from Jordan and from carriers, you know, which are a couple hundred miles off the coast of Iran.
• 34:10
  So, you know, as a practical matter, the US and Israel could just keep bombing the big Jesus out of, out of Iran without breathing hard.
• 34:23
  But, but when you, when you do that, you do get to a point where the obvious military targets, the low-hanging fruit is all, is all gone.
• 34:38
  It was like a point at which you start, you know, running out of munitions that you might want for other theaters if something else was going to happen.
• 34:46
  Everything is finite, even the formidable, you know, US arsenal, and you're, you're reminding me of the difference between tactics and strategies.
• 34:57
  You know, this is a difference that medium-sized powers like Australia have to think about a lot more because you have to, you have to know what the end game is.
• 35:04
  If you're an Australian strategist thinking about the Australian relationship with China, then you know that any escalation is going to end with China winning.
• 35:13
  So, you have to be strategic about your tactics, not that Australia is very good at doing that, but one would hope that Australia would be strategic about its tactics in the knowledge that the adversary is definitely going to win the final chess move.
• 35:26
  The United States hasn't had to worry about that, has had the luxury of assuming that the end game is American military success.
• 35:36
  So, I suppose it's easier to confuse tactics with strategies and to go in full guns blazing saying, look at we took out that, we took out that, we killed this guy, we got rid of that, we've got all of this overwhelming firepower.
• 35:47
  And at the end of the day, you're still sitting there with your finger up, you know, as well the Iranians can wait you out and gas prices go up and the midterms approach and, you know, all of a sudden petrol stations in regional Australia have a no diesel left sign on the, on the time.
• 36:05
  Well, I couldn't be really more, you know, this isn't a case of tactics, this isn't a case so much of tactics undermining strategic objectives, but it's a case where strategic objectives seem completely to be irrelevant.
• 36:28
  Because, you know, the United States is a famously, you know, acknowledged, you know, in song and dance as a global power with global interests.
• 36:41
  And the United States has serious things at stake in its strategic competition with China in the first instance and Russia in the second.
• 36:57
  So, you would have thought that if the United States has a sigh on the ball, it's not going to be distracted by a costly war of the kind it's now fighting with Iran, which is not a strategic threat to the United States.
• 37:16
  I mean, to the United States are an important forwards in that conjunction because, you know, one of my fears about this is that it's going to give rise inevitably to anti-Semitism and to conspiracy theorizing about the Jews and the control of global Zionists.
• 37:31
  And I don't think you have to be an anti-Semite or a conspiracy theorist to think that the most parsimonious explanation for some of this is that is that if there is a strategic game that says that Iran must not have nuclear material, you know, or a nuclear bomb or that even if it lacks the capacity to deliver it to the United States because it could deliver it to Israel.
• 37:57
  Then everything sort of only makes strategic sense. If you're a LeCoudnick who thinks that any price is worth paying for zero tolerance of an Iranian New York, how do you understand Israel's role in this and people's perceptions of it?
• 38:18
  So this is how I look at it.
• 38:27
  The Israelis have been pushing successive U.S. administrations to use force against Iran to disarm it and if possible to destroy the Islamic Republic such that the government is replaced by a more compliant, less city logically charged government.
• 38:57
  And that pressure, as I think is sort of well known, has been quite persistent and quite intense at times.
• 39:13
  But name me a president that has succumbed to that pressure before Donald Trump.
• 39:22
  And I might add before Donald Trump in his second term.
• 39:27
  Okay, name me a president. And of course you can't name a president who has succumbed because every single president, Republican or Democrat, who has come under that sort of pressure from Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, and he's been our Prime Minister almost for two decades now.
• 39:47
  Yeah, about that. Every president has said, no, because typically in the course of the U.S. Israeli relationships, certainly since I would say the Reagan, you know, Iran.
• 40:07
  But you know, the Israelis have a strong lobby in Washington. And that lobby has always been focused on Congress, not on the White House.
• 40:18
  So I was focused on Congress because Congress appropriates funds. So, you know, if you know, if the Israelis are going to get the kind of economic assistance that they need to maintain a military establishment, they really need to be lobbying Congress and lobbying Congress constantly and lobbying them hard.
• 40:42
  Because it's Congress that will appropriate the funds. Well, that's been their focus and it's made a lot of sense. Now, as far as the White House is concerned, well, that's fine. You know, that's just, that's just politics.
• 41:02
  And if there's nothing strategic at stake, well, then, you know, why would any White House pay a political price to, you know, disappoint Israelis on, you know, any one issue or another, particularly on the issue of military assistance?
• 41:24
  It just doesn't, it wouldn't make political sense. So no administration, Republican or Democrat, is done that part. When there's something strategic at stake, something that transcends, you know, the daily, you know, grind of, you know, political log rolling.
• 41:49
  Then there just hasn't been an administration that subordinates that strategic interest, whatever, whatever it is, to politics, just doesn't work that way.
• 42:02
  No, but that doesn't mean that it's not happening now, right?
• 42:06
  Well, there are a lot of Trump is doing a lot of firsts, you know, it's hard to explain his behavior in many, many arenas.
• 42:19
  And so I don't blame people for saying, you know, the simplest explanation is often the best. And, you know, if, if after October 7th, the Israeli government has a zero tolerance policy towards adversaries and regards them as an existential threat and it's taking a, we're not going to take any more shit from you guys attitude.
• 42:48
  And one of the most skilled politicians in the world in the form of Netanyahu constantly has the year of one of the least experienced presidents.
• 42:58
  You can imagine, you can imagine that being impactful, which is not to absorb the Trump administration of responsibility for having listened and haven't gone along with it, but it's not a, it's not a great look.
• 43:12
  No, no, it isn't. And I unhappily concede that, you know, that point because if, you know, if the question is, is this, if the Israelis had not been a factor, would Trump have attacked Iran?
• 43:35
  I think the answer would probably be no.
• 43:41
  Right. On the other hand, if Trump had said no, Israel would still have attacked Iran. So it goes both ways. I guess to some extent.
• 43:52
  Well, yeah, I mean, that's another one of these counterfactuals, like the one I myself just advanced, you know, that's, you know, it's, how do you, how do you assess a counterfactual because it's about something that hasn't happened.
• 44:08
  But based on precedent, okay, in past instances, when a US president has, has said to a direct request of the Israeli Prime Minister to, to attack Iran.
• 44:28
  And the, and the American president has said, no, these Israelis have not gone forward unilaterally to attack Iran.
• 44:39
  With this past experience, this inference from the past, would it have held true in this case? It's possible.
• 44:49
  Many people have pointed out, I think with, you know, with a great deal of justification, that certainly from an Israeli perspective, Iran looked right now a lot weaker than it ever has.
• 45:05
  So it might have been the case that even if Trump decided the United States would kind of sit it out, you know.
• 45:15
  Netanyahu would have concluded, well, you know, something, the Iranians are so weak now, they're so vulnerable that, that we Israelis can just do this, you know, unilaterally.
• 45:25
  But I think that's seriously open to doubt.
• 45:34
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• 46:55
  You