104: The Iran war isn’t over

>> Hi, everybody.

Welcome to Ask relief 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. The back and Israel next week. I had to get this out.

I don't have my equipment for give 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 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.

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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 face a moccalomo 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 sing 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.

And it's a young 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 in, that's because a lot of its actual

ideas.

And again, this is an episode 93, are Leninist Maoist ideas in 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 of of as Lenin said in his 1916 book that the Apotheosis,”

I forget the words he used. But the end, the natural end of capitalism is imperialism and all the evils of the world of 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 Quran says. And Jesus said, and the book of Psalms and 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 admit-turn 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 straight of her moves into oil shipping and to the oil infrastructures

of Qatar and Saudi and Emirates, etc. So this was the point where Israeli-American interests diverged. I have talked about the point where they diverge Israel and America were fighting a very much overlapping war with overlapping interests, but not an identical war, not identical interests.

There were different things and they had different visions for how it would end. Then people, you know, more clever than I and why is there 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 U.S. and Israel.

We seem to have reached that. 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.

And like because they had different levels of pain they were willing to absorb. Israel is 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.

very enthusiastic yesterday.

And even promised that Iran would stop enriching uranium, something to Iranians explicitly have in degree do, coincided with Republican candidate Clay Fuller's win. If you were following this and I had a driver in the U.S. yesterday who was following it and didn't stop talking to me about it. And 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 if deep red parts of Georgia can be threatened, purple districts, swing states can be much more threatened and the midterm loom very large for Republicans.

As a Trump is, it's quite reasonable to think that this war is quite unpopular. The 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, send com 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 on mass, and the cheap stockpiles of missiles and drones.

That they need to close her moves 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 Iranian and rich for capabilities and digging out the Iranian stockpile and handing it over to the Americans or the Russians.

It's not something that this regime that a moccola my 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 air strikes against Hezbollah and Lebanon. Israel said publicly that the ceasefire does not include Lebanon.

And Pakistan, which media of the ceasefire said it does, Iran said it does. The American said it doesn't. It seems to be that this is the crux of the question that tells us who won in the last. 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 of 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 U.S. is going to demand an exchange for the ceasefire or 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 its succeed in holding the global oil supply hostage.

For Hizbalah, is Hizbalah in enough of a reason for Iran to hold the streets of

blame get a fortune on the world stage if Iran is still holding up the oil supplies

because Israel's bomb is Hizbalah 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 the lower simmer, which is the Israelis against Hizbalah. 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-Commandic 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, the 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 warmoses it reopened." He was actually maneuvering to position himself better to declare a ceasefire to head off what was in 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 it play.

It's as 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 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. 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 in the outside observer would have expected a year ago, and I'm talking about every

actor here, Israeli, Ron, 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.

“Based 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'm going 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 in the psychoanalysis ponditory about each leader, and that's just it dominates the arrow, 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 a position leader, your illopedid 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 time scale. After the June war, the media coverage in the region and in the West constantly emphasized that the war had ended. I'll just zero a headline, June 24, Israel and Iran agreed to cease fire, raising hopes of an end to the dangerous conflict.

Roaders of Arabia cease fire 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 cease fire took effect. CBS News, Israel drops all wartime restrictions, freeing people to return to their lives. In other words, post-war normalization was the entering into effect.

The war's finished civilian life resumes.

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 they did this bounded event that ended.”

The news cycle has the memory of a, you know, 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, has been still stood, and has been allowed will still seek permanent war until Israel's destruction, 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 an including mass sacrifice that their own economy, and their own polity, is legitimate to lay on the altar of the world-redemptive makala. 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-Arabis Nasserist clash. When Arab armies united since the 50s behind Gamal Abdul Nasser'd Egypt, and this Arab-based 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 very specific reason and on 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 faithfully undermined just by its own unbroken

“strength 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 these rarends kind of think is happening to them now with a moqawama concept. Now it's harder to achieve this kind of idea, this kind of victory, where Shinyar constant failure will discredit the moqawama, is much harder to do than nasirism. As we explained in the episode on the moqawama, "Homani will follow Homani 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, Homani 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.

The weakness became good, a spiritual good, and ultimately, therefore, a geopolitical good because spiritual purity in Islam is long been associated with geopolitical success, and the growth of in Islamic empire and Islamic conquest and confidence on the world stage, and therefore sacrifice, martyrdom, including mass sacrifice of an unwilling population, became in hominism 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 it?”

But is it actually bringing 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 would be willing to go to the hundreds of thousands. How did they eat before he died, basically, said 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 Mokawama has that secular

Arab nationalist Nazism didn't have. So this is a harder nut to crack than, again, Israel of 2026 is orders of magnitude stronger

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 Brown Easterner. All of these European romantic notions, imbibed by these ideal odds of the Mokawama, 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 these Israelis genuinely think they are in a 25-year arc in the way they had to face nascerism and panaribism that will eventually defeat the Mokawama through an 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/marterdom making us powerful will turn out to be incorrect.

And more to the point neither of these narratives, Nathamukawama, Nathia's rarely sense of a rehash of the struggle against panaribism, 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, a missile defense capabilities on the other. If you master one of those two, Milson drones or missile defense, you survive, as 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 it 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 challenges of interceptor arsenals and production lines. We don't have enough.

There are into 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, I'm 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 where 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 I, and you will learn that the Germans and the French and the British mostly the most intensely the Germans, because

they really lost at the Treaty of Versailles. And so this was burning in them, this was a desperate strategic need, their interests were desperately stirred by learning the lessons of World War I. But the great lesson was that static trans warfare is disastrous, massively costly, catastrophic, somewhere in France is a memorial to the class of 1914, show 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 I, especially the Germans again, although the Allies in D-Day would prove that they were learning it quickly as well, the importance of combined arms.

Infinity 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

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 the air

war that proceeded 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 lost. 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 comrades 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

and 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 of massively increases 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, dreams 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 fat interceptors, America has to increase to 400, which is the new Pentagon order, it has to increase to 4,000, and these are incredibly extensive missiles, so we need to make them cheaper through technological innovations

or finding ways to do the same thing with much less incredibly exquisite technologically advanced missiles, or sheer economies of scale. If you produce 4,000 of a thing, as opposed to a hundred of a thing, each one will be cheaper even if it's exactly the same thing, 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 interseed, just to retain control over Babel Nandab, 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 drones 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 are just fears of the future, these are realities, Russia deployed tens of thousands of drones against Ukraine.

They've run launched hundreds of missiles in a single volley at Israel to penetrate its missile defenses. This is what war is now, and you run with its cheap and spread out stockpiles of cheap drones

So yeah, it has no military, yeah, 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 II, it was decisive, and now everybody gets it. A hundred-thousand 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 distance, medium distance, short distance, 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's even more desperate, when

“it doesn't have any other options doesn't invest in any other things.”

Israeli officials of said they have dramatically accelerated production of RO3 interceptors, but nobody thinks that's actually enough, they cost $2 to $3 million per interceptor. That cost has to come down. Ballistic missiles have to become targetable with cheaper and slower interceptors, iron-domed 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's currently dependent on the U.S. for resupply of interceptors. That's a problem that Israelis are working on, that's not healthy, not for American enough for Israel. America can't crank out enough Patriot missiles to satisfy just the

demand of 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 will 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. Now, keep it simple and obvious, choke points are the Achilles heel of the nations of the world that prioritise prosperity and happiness over ideological insanity.

Gas prices hurt American voters, American voters matter to American leaders and ways that the pain of ordinary Iranians don't does it matter to the fanatics of the Iran. So if you'd 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 state of our moves was closed. That needs to be multiplied tenfold.

There need to be multiple pipelines buried underground hardm against attack that can handle millions of barrels per day and can be turned on with the flip of a switch. Our moves 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 bubbleman dub, to circumvent Swiss completely, and the whole thing has to be activatable that 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 a global economy if the choke points are shut down.

If the 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 the 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 mucawama

strategy of redemption, who never ending destruction.

That kind of leverage over the free world.

There are very few people in this world, as bullish on America, as basically pro-American

“as me, 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 learned 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 swabbling. Obama literally started Obama, the first Obama term, defying their foreign policy as when the opposite of Bush. Even when being blindly anti-bushed 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, reversing Biden. If Democrats take the White House in 2028, then the media-farned 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 profoundly affect 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 whip-lash. But at the same time, it's very old American cultural peck-a-dillow. It says American as apple pie, it says American as jazz. Here's the thing. When America's foreign policy debate inevitably is concerned, 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, it's own unique language and culture.

It has an enemy in the Iranian regime that has never stopped swearing to eliminate us.

Not, it 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 Humanee, 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 Ali'an to the right of return or every even is rarely overseas. It's a referendum geared to one specific outcome, but the Iranian regime never believed in it. It was meant to fool idiots who worked 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 exterminationist attrition war, has said so constantly for decades and built out the capabilities to do so, and then actually launch those wars and capabilities and attacks.

America can sit all this out. It really can. The isolationist impulses 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 will 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 they're eased with which you can shut down

will only become more desperate that that leverage will only be used more, that because

“the very regime the chanted death to America for 47 years, that that picked up the notion”

that America is the great evil of this world from Leninist, Maoist roots imported into Xi'sism.

That very regime is going to double down and pressuring the West, using this one lover

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 interests.

But America should have a sustainable and reliable foreign policy if it wants to keep any stability, stable and loyal local allies, where there's the Israelis of 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.