The Reluctant Prince: Can Reza Pahlavi Lead Iran’s Future? Q&A with Eli Lake

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Hello, it's Sarah's welcome back. This is Eli Lake. This is kind of a bonus episode. We're going to be dropping a few of these every now and again. And right now, we're going to be talking about Iran.

It's been in the news. I've been writing a lot about it for the free press. And it's just a conversation with my producer, Poppy Demon.

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Hi, Poppy. We're trying something new in kind of to do these interim episodes

before we launch the first season of breaking history,

2026. And that is just sort of update on events and try to draw lessons and use some of my print journalism as a launching pad. I wanted to ask you, when you started covering Iran, and why you have such a special interest in it,

because everything's coming to the full right now, but this is something you've been covering for about 20 years. Yeah, more than 20 years. I started really getting into Iran because I covered the aftermath of the 1999

Taheron University uprising. A lot of people, myself included, would say, that that's the beginning of what we would see as the sort of chain of unrest, the popular discontent with the Islamic Republic that came from the 1979 Revolution.

And we should really talk a little bit about that period, because in 1997, Iranians elect Muhammad Khatini, who is a reformer president, who had promised more freedoms to allow to stop closing opposition newspapers, for example,

who had promised basically kind of more freedoms.

And he was supported by a lot of the student movement, which is what an ultimately came to the Taheron University, part of it. And then, during Khatini's presidency, the West began really engaging,

Christian Aminport famously at CNN goes back to Iran. She's Iranian, and she reports on the Khatini election,

And it was a story that we were very much kind of wanted to hear.

“This is after the fall of the Berlin Wall,”

a number of former authoritarian and totalitarian states had been going democratic. It did feel like the end of history to borrow that phrase with Francis Fukhyama. And Hottemi was part of that story.

The problem was, he was never able to get his reforms

out of Iran's parliament, and is the modulus. Effectively, all of his reforms were vetoed, because he had the votes in the parliament. And it's the modulus. But then the Guardian Council and the Supreme Leader

at this point, Iatola Ali Hamene, would not allow it. Add to this, there is something known as the chain murders, which are a series of these awful kind of killings by, maybe, called the equivalent of the Iranian plumbers from the Watergate era, which are

former high-level security people, some of them are still in the Intelligence Service and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, but they don't really have an official-- they're not acting officially, or at least that's the cover story.

But a number of prominent intellectuals, newspaper editors are showing up dead.

And this is the era of Hottemi.

So you have the promise of reform. You have the external facing promises of what he would call a dialogue of civilizations and trying to kind of knit Iran into the international community. This is the height of neoliberalism, again,

only a few years away from the collapse of the Soviet Union. But at the same time, you have this reality. And the Iranian students at Tehran University and other universities who've gotten involved. They understood this.

The crackdown was absolutely vicious. And so I was covering that because there was still a lot of people who could get the word out. A few years later, I started covering the fate of someone named Akbar Gange, who was originally

very zealous supporter of the Revolution.

And he had come to see it, it's flaws.

And from prison, he wrote these dramatic open letters to the Supreme Leader harmonizing. If you're so confident that you represent the will of the people, why don't you stand for election? I thought it's extraordinarily brave.

“I was, I think I was writing for the New York sun.”

I think I was one of the only Western journalists who was really covering that story. And I got to know a number of people in the Iranian opposition at the time. And these were people who impressed me.

I felt, I had an opportunity, I should say, at the end of 2002, on the eve of the Iraq war in 2003, by original plan was to travel relationships with some of the Kurdish parties in Iraq, was to travel through Tehran and go into Iraq.

It turned out to be too dangerous at the time. There was a group of Kurdish Islamists who were on that border, who were kidnapping Westerners. So I ended up staying in Tehran for two weeks, but it was an absolute education.

I did hook up with some of the freedom movement at the time. And some of the students and what just having been there when I came away with is that something that I think everybody now realizes, which is that this regime has zero legitimacy.

And that all of the things that we are kind of that are projected back to the West, Death to America, Death to Israel, the students that I spoke to thought it was a joke. And they were at the point where if we were being told

by the regime that this was the case, then we believe the opposite. I mean, that was, I'm oversimplifying a bit. You also saw, I also saw all these ways in which Iranians were kind of violating the rules of the strict Islamic theocracy.

So I was able to, I was able to hook up with some people who showed me how to buy liquor in Iran illegally. It's this fascinating way you kind of go into a story. You say you want something else. And some of the sort of nose was called,

I read a call about that. I met filmmakers and artists and people who really just wanted to live in a Western freedom and that still had critiques of the West, I should say. But it was, I kind of a long discussion

with kind of a aspiring filmmaker about the movie, American Beauty,

“do you remember that movie with Kevin Spacey?”

And the argument was, I mean, what he would say is sort of, I remember this very vividly, what he'd say is, he would say yes, everything you say about our system is correct, it's corrupt, it's stifling. But this movie reflects a deep kind of corrosion

of the American soul. Look at what happens to this guy, this is unthinkable, that he would have to sefer with his daughter's friend, ruin his life and everything like that. And that stayed with me.

But this was still a period, especially because of some of the little bit of the loosening under a hot spring, a lot of people who were middle class

So there was the beginning of this opening. And then of course, it was stifled. And with that was the kernel of it. So I've stayed with that story. And I've really had an interest in seeing this transition

“to democracy because I think it's the one population”

in the Middle East where if there was a vote, you would get a fairly kind of pro Western free vote, you'd get a pro Western government. Well, let me ask you, I want to talk about the opposition. I want to talk to you about Reza Palavi.

But I just want to pick up on one thing that you talked to them about the 90s as a kind of origin to revolution, to disruption. Do you see things that you saw then happening now? What do you think is the link to everything

that's taking place in Iran? Well, what I see now is what happened was is that they regime crushed descent. And they have exiled, jailed, or murdered anybody who wanted to reform the system at this point.

I mean, we just saw another round of arrest of so-called reformists, but they really were non-left. I saw the beginning of that. When I was in Iran, these were literally show trials of hotime advisors that were charged with treason.

This isn't the end of 2002. And when I say they were charged with treason, the crime was that they had participated in a poll with the Gallup Organization, which was Western Organization, as part of what sometimes called track two

or track three diplomacy, where you have our civil society leaders meeting as opposed to diplomats. And this was approved by the hotime government. And then they turned it into sort of an example of treachery.

You know, no, they never arrested hotime.

And hotime is loathed today by most Iranians because he didn't stand up for his principles. But many of his closest aids were, you know, there was a trial, and they were sent to the event Avan Prison, which is a dungeon.

And that was also, that also left it an impression on me. Even though I didn't speak farcee, I was able to watch it with somebody who could translate and show me what was going on. And it was the message was very clear to everybody.

So that was the beginning of the end. And then it's just gotten worse. And every single time, if you look at the 2009 election, Obama's first year, the people are supporting, again, reformer candidates, Musavi and Karabi,

who are still under house arrest, I might add. Although they've come out in favor of the revolution. And then they stole the election they gave it to this guy, Aquadinaja. And now the irony is that Aquadinaja,

the sort of hardliner, handpicked, you know,

in that that was the second term.

Aquadinaja, you know, who isn't a central figure, he has come out for pretty radical reform at this point. That is just shows the revolution's kind of ethereal young. And they consume themselves. So we're at a point now in a running history

“where there is, I think I wouldn't call it a consensus,”

but I think that there's, I think it would be safe to say 70 to 80% of the country would like to get rid of this awful corrupt system. And they don't have the guns and they don't have, they don't have the power of the violence.

And so anything we can do at this point to try to balance that, I don't mean sending arms to average Iranians. What I mean is to say that there's a lot of things I think the United States can do short of bombing them,

that would be extremely helpful the next time they come to the streets. And I think it's only a matter of time because what we saw the end of December and early January was not the first time the Iranian people

had said enough, it was the seventh or eighth time we'd seen it in sort of a national level. And I think that it's only a matter of time, the structural problems in Iran right now are so awful. It's not just the currency,

which everybody talks about, the reality is worth nothing.

There's now enough potable drinking water. There is a huge problem right now with the pensions of just average workers because they've been looted by the people who really run the economy,

which is a revolutionary guard for it. There is a series of bank failures. All these things are kind of independent of sanctions,

“which is what I think some of the people”

who make excuses for it. So in that respect, I'd think it's a matter of time, the worst thing that can happen. And it's even though I still think that Trump is probably gonna hand up bombing Iran,

I think that negotiations are very bad 'cause it is a lifeline to the regime. And it sends the message back to the people that we can cut a deal that will allow us to keep slaughtering you.

So I would hope I think it was very bad idea to start those talks like they had. I think you got to let them sort of steal. - The thing is, I think crucially with that is because of the way that President Trump has been acting

in the foreign stage, for the first time,

that there's gonna be some kind of intervention. We've obviously seen him acting Venezuela and other places. So assuming, I mean, this all tees up where we're gonna take this discussion,

which is that the hesitancy from a lot of Americans or any form of intervention is,

“what are we gonna leave structurally as an opposition?”

You know, too many times that we intervened and there's not been a kind of plan for afterwards, that's kind of how the critique goes. So tell me, for beginners start here, who is Reza Palavi and what do you think of him

as a potential feature lead over Iran? - Well, Reza Palavi is the kind of crown prince of the Palavi dynasty that was replaced at the end of, you know, in the 1979 revolution. So his father left in part

because he was unwilling to do the kind of, to use the violence that, to do the kinds of things that this regime is willing to do in the face of popular on rest. And, you know, his 18 year old son at the time,

Reza Palavi, who was next in law in the crown prince, left with him. I mean, he wasn't, he was already in the States who's training in the, in Texas to be a cadet in the Imperial Air Force.

He attended us a master of Williams College with a very prestigious school. I might have the same school where former C.F. a famous C.I.I. director and in Richard Helms attended. And then he joined his family

who had to go from like sort of country to country because no one would take him in this weird, in a regular period of 1979. So he was in Cairo, Morocco, and all these places. And he earned his college degree

at the University, the rest of his college degree, the University of Southern California through kind of correspondence classes. And, - Can I ask you the question? Why study in the US?

I mean, and what is the effect of that? - Well, a lot of elites, from all over the world, study in the US, 'cause we have great university. - Yeah.

- So that's the first reason.

- But is it sort of a signifier of aligning with Western values on some level?

“I mean, I mean, I think, I think certainly,”

Palo, Muhammad Reses Shah, his father was a very strong American ally. - Yeah. - He was an autocrat. But the autocracy or the authoritarianism in Iran

is sometimes overstated. In our two-partner, I have many critiques of the chasm between the ultra wealthy and many in the poor and as is kind of the Persian custom. Palo, he was a flunter, he liked to,

he was ostentatious displays of his wealth, which didn't play well if you were living at or below the poverty line. But on the other hand, he was responsible for great reforms in Iran that kind of took Iran out of,

their own sort of dark ages. And he was able to get women's suffrage. He got in March, much more universal education, improved the literacy rate of Iranians, and did something known as land reform,

which actually really was a structural challenge

“to the power of the clerics in Iranians society,”

which is what Ayatol Hamini comes from. The Shia kind of theologians of comb, which is right near Tehran. So they were the many of them were the absentee land owners for much of the country.

And you had a kind of peasant class as a result, almost like the surface of Russia.

And finally, it was Muhammad Resesha that changed that,

he did it through decree, meaning it wasn't, by that point it was really hard to, you couldn't say it was a truly elected modulus or parliament. But these were at least the reforms themselves were very much and keeping with the democratic tradition in Iran

that goes back to the 1905 Constitutional Revolution. But we can get into this, but there's a bit of a mythology around the US intervention in 1953 when the CIA through Kermit Rese, about persuades Muhammad Resesha,

who's that that a young man, a very unready young kind of monarch, to assert his constitutional authority and fire the prime minister, Muhammad Mosada. Now, Mosada is this kind of heroic figure

for the anti-imperial left. But Mosada was very much of a kind of like, would have agreed with much of the reforms of Muhammad Resesha later on. And I would say that this is called a coup.

I don't think it was a coup. I think it was Muhammad Resesha.

Muhammad Mosada was himself trying to basically

drive the shot out of the country. It was the power struggle. And he had alienated a number of other constituencies that he had in his own base. And the reason why Muhammad Mosada had to ultimately

resign his position back in 1953.

or the British MI6.

It was because the senior Iitola in comb,

Iitola Hoshani was also the speaker of the Mojlas. He had withdrawn his support as earlier support for Mosada's coalition. And was now opposing him and had brought people on the street demanding that he resigned.

Now, the irony here is that Hoshani himself, who was a bit of an extremist, was a huge influence on Iitola Homani.

“So in this respect, I think it's fair to say”

that Homani, even though he wasn't really a prominent figure at the time, was probably in the camp that wanted to get rid of Mosada, which is unlike the story that people tell about the 79 revolution, which is that, well, they nursed this grudge for a generation.

And this is for Mosada and the coup, the people who ended up stealing the revolution, Homani and the clerics, are the same people that were responsible ultimately for turning the tide against Mosada.

So I never bought the argument that the 79 revolution

was somehow informed by Anger over America and British role in this 53 affair. I don't want you to call it a coup. - So back to now. - Well, back to Brazil, Palavi.

- Yes. - So he got up to his kind of Western education. - Yeah, he's respiratory education. And then in the early 80, I mean, so his father, Robert Resesha has cancer, it's at a pretty bad way

by 1980, it had it for many years. He kept it for his own family. He dies in 1980 and all the responsibilities are maybe trying to take back the dynasty fall on the shoulders of this very young man, Resapalavi.

And Resapalavi, in the early 80s, he has meetings with the CIA at one point. He gets some funding from the CIA as I report in my piece, it's regime irritation, not regime change. But over time, what I would say is that what happens

with Resapalavi is that he assimilates, he's in America, a young enough age, that he becomes very American, he's looking around and he sees the sort of trends of history and lives through the end of the Cold War,

collapse of the Soviet Union, and believes in liberal democracy. And as somebody who believes in liberal democracy for years, he would say, I'm happy to lead the movement to transition Iran to a democracy, but I have no interest in becoming an absolute monarch.

I do not want to become the Shah. So I say at the end of this piece that it's not the mullahs that destroyed the Palavi law, and it's America, because nearly 50 years later, you have people in the streets of Iran shouting,

"Javit Shah, long live the King." They want to bring back the monarchy, but you have the crown prince who, in his bones,

“I think, doesn't believe that we should bring back,”

maybe he would be a constitutional monarch, like King Charles in the UK. But he doesn't, I think, want to actually rule the way his father did to be an absolute monarch. - Yeah.

- So that's one of the kind of histories ironies. Now, can he be the leader of the revolution? I believe he could be. But in order to do that, he needs to unite all the different factions that oppose this regime

and get them on the same page. And that covers, there's still a union movement in Iran that covers the human rights lawyers, like Narkas Muhammadi, who was just recensed to another seven years, that means

that ethnic minorities, most notably,

the 15 million Kurds that live in Iran.

And he has to, you know, do some coalition building. And does he have it in him? Is he that kind of person?

“- I think, in his best moments, he can be that.”

The problem I think is that the people, there's a movement, there are like millions of Iranians particularly in diaspora, but also inside the country, that are not interested in that. They want him to be the king, and to be the king.

- King's don't make coalitions with people, they rule. - So this is a matter. - Why did they want that? Because they think it's cleaner, it's that someone needs to take the reins

or they believe in monochin general. - I think there's a lot of different motivations going on. I think that part of the motivation is, as all politics come down to compare to what? - Yeah.

- So, there are a lot of people who were not born who don't have any living memory of life under the shop. But they have a vision of life under the shop

So that's the first thing.

The mist rule of the of Hamanai and his fellow mullas is such that I think we're at the stage now we're most in marina and think, well, I want whatever you replace because you've driven our country into the ground.

- So that's the first thing. - Yeah. - Then I think there's a, again, there are millions of Iranians who fled Iran in '79 who did feel they some feel to do the shop.

And they want reciprocity to be a man he's not. So there's that as well. And then there's reciprocity himself. And reciprocity is not just to kind of

“committed, I believe, to liberal democracy as a,”

as a superior way to organize society. He is a student of Jean Sharpe who believed in nonviolent resistance and is one of the foremost zero reticions of what's known as people power.

We should do a breaking history on the success of, but that's, that's what we associate with, say, Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi. And so he wanted something like this for Iran. He's wanted that for a long time.

It is an irony that we have this moment in history where Trump promised at one point to, you know, basically use American arms to help this movement, which is kind of against the spirit of Jean Sharpe.

Although I certainly understand why reciprocity once a military intervention as do other so many Iranians that I talk to at this point and clued in a Serena body and other Nobel Peace Prize

winning Iranian human rights lawyer who would never have

said that before, but it's become so desperate after the slaughter of January 8th and 9th,

“that I think the argument is basically listen,”

the people don't have any, they don't have guns, the regime has guns. So can you start picking these guys off? - And willing to kill so many. I mean, these cracked on numbers disputed,

but you know, tens of thousands of people, it's like that scale. - Right. - You know, you feel like your hand is forced. - Right, it's like Bobby R.

- Yeah. - It's absolutely grotesque. They're now purging anybody who was slightly reformist. So you've got 'em, you know, this is a really ugly moment.

And the question is, what can military intervention do?

And if we're being honest, we're in uncharted territory. - Yeah. - Because I don't think a full scale invasion of Iran is on the table at all. That's not gonna happen.

- Well, that pivot's nicely to where I want to take listen as next, which is into the halls of DC. So we've got Resapada V. We've got the protest going on. What's stopping President Trump just saying,

we back Resapilly, we're gonna do anything we can to put him in power. Why the hesitancy from them? - Well, he hasn't been in the country since 1978. So, I mean, that's almost 50 years.

I mean, like, you don't know. I mean, yes, people call his name. There is a serious poll from people who are reliable and that say he has 31% support in the country, which is far more than any other figure

that they pulled for, including Hamanaya or regime figures. But that, he hasn't won it election. It's unclear that he would, like, the transition documents that Palabies office has put out, talk about this idea

that he would be the kind of the leader of the uprising. So, he would be the final say in that he would be the transitional leader, but how long is that period of transition until? I mean, all those are, he's questioned.

“Then I think that the Trump administration”

would like to keep their options open to see if they can cut a deal. Now, there's a great way of under, it's kind of a frame from someone who I'm trying to get an interview with,

Karim Sajra Por, who is a terrific, he's the counsel, I think he's the counsel and farm relations or Kariniki or one of these great things, but he's a great writer and writes a lot for the Atlantic. And what he says is that in the beginning of the revolution,

it was 20% Charlottes and 80% believers and now it's 80% Charlottes and 20% true believers. So, the idea would be that you kill a couple Charlottes, you kill a few more true believers, and then the Charlottes look around and they say,

"I don't want to be on the kill list, maybe I should join." And then maybe you get one of them when they're more reasonable, and they really well cut a deal. That's the idea. But that still leaves the Iranian people potentially in the large,

and it's not the kind of full, I don't think it's worth the Iranian people are demanding, which is a constitutional referendum that eliminates the powers of the Supreme Leader

to something like the 1905 Constitution, or maybe the 1925 Constitution. And that's what I think they want, and that's what they've been saying. So, I don't know how that'll be reconciled,

“but I think that a lot of this is Trump trying to keep his flexibility”

and his options open. Similar to what we're seeing in Venezuela, although I remind some of my pessimistic friends on that that there is still a plan to transition to elections, so for now you're gonna have the vice president

and the rest of the regime making these decisions, but making decisions and answering to Mark Rubio and Donald Trump and not, you know, the people who, you know, Venezuela's an enormous debt right now to China and Russia, mainly China.

So, to have that is an interesting, we'll see, is that an interregnant, but that's very different than what policy one, so I think that's part of it too. - Let's just play out a couple of those scenarios

that you've touched on a little bit more detail. So, if the regime did fall, the policy steps up as some kind of interim leader or the rallying together the opposition, what the people want is a referendum

which would vote on certain specifics of a way in which the system would operate,

“are you a presidential or how the elections would work?”

Is that kind of one pathway? - I think when they want to eliminate the supreme leader, as Akbar Gajia, we talked about earlier, it said, if you're so confident, you represent the will of the Iranian people, why don't you stand for election?

- Yeah. - So, they want to eliminate this office which is kind of kept its thumb on the Iranian society,

you know, since 1979, so that's the first and foremost thing.

And then, beyond that, I just think they won, again, I'm going to rely on Korean soccer because I think he says it so well, they want their government to be organized around the principle of make Iran great again

as opposed to death to America. So, so many of the resources that Iran got after signing the nuclear deal, when all the sanctions were lifted, and the United States paid in pallets of cash

for the release of various hostages, that money was not reinvested in Iran, that money went to like Hezbollah and Iran's kind of regional ambitions. And one of the ironies here is that I have noticed

that the self-styled, so-called alleged, anti-imperialist left, has taken up the cause of Iranian sovereignty without grappling or reconciling the fact that Iran is a regional imperial power.

That's what it means when it, you know, basically kind of, you know, funds, arms, trains, directs, proxy terror groups and militias and little statelets like the Hussies in Yemen and Hezbollah

and Lebanon, which was more powerful

than the Lebanese Army, no longer because of Israel or Hamas or the Iraqi militias that, you know, were maybe necessary at various points to go after ISIS and Al-Qaeda, but no longer and have not absorbed into the Iranian National Army.

So, Iran is an imperial power. - Yeah. - And I do think that this is,

“I think this is a moment that will be remembered”

with great shame for the left, or at least those who want to sort of maintain their kind of commitment to anti-imperialism, 'cause they've picked the side of, ultimately, kind of regional imperialist.

Now, you could say America's more powerful imperial power, at least according to that analysis, I would quibble. But that doesn't really make much sense. I mean, because especially now that you have such overwhelming evidence, the Iranian people do not want this.

- Yeah. - Because that's a big part of it too. And I think they also want, you know, I mean, what you see every time you've got failed states driven into the ground by fanatics

and authoritarian's, which, you know, there's a, they drive away their best and brightest. So, you have, there are plenty of Iranian engineers who probably could do something to figure out how to, you know, deal with Iran's water crisis,

or to deal with Iran's failing banks.

Iran is a vast nation of 90 million people.

There's a lot of talent. But why would, if you had any kind of talent, why would you want to stay in Iran? Why wouldn't you just try to leave? - Absolutely.

- When beloved family patriarch Gary Ferris went missing, his family looked everywhere on their property until they came across something horrifying. So, homicide. - Absolutely.

- The blame game in this family went round and round. This is bloodesticker, the Ferris wheel. I would, don't see how anyone can look at this story

- Follow and listen to bloodesticker,

the Ferris wheel, on the free Odyssey app, or wherever you get your podcast. - And what about Donald Trump as a president?

“Is he uniquely positioned to achieve peace in Iran?”

Or, you know, how do we compare this to the rest of his record in foreign policy? - Well, Trump has an opportunity to be an historically great president in foreign policy, but he's not there yet.

And there's still a lot of open files. So, I think he was vindicated on U.S. intervention and allowing Israel to do the 12-day war. I think it exposed Iran as a paper tiger. I left them incredibly vulnerable,

which is, you know, what we're dealing with now.

- Yeah. - But the job is in finish until, I mean, there is a transition to something better. And if he ends up making a deal, as we speak, right now, Steve Woodkov is on-void to the world

and Jared Christianer are meeting with high-level Iranian officials in Oman. I mean, if he cuts a deal that allows this regime to survive,

“then I think he will go down as kind of like George H.W. Bush,”

when he urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein, only to allow the dictator to use his attack helicopters to go after and slaughter tens of thousands of his own people. Or Obama, when he drew the red line against Bashar al-Assad in Syria using chemical weapons,

he does and then Obama kind of backs away from it, puns it to Congress who doesn't do anything. These in my view are kind of legacies that if I was Trump, I would want to avoid and I have reason to think that he doesn't want to be known that way.

And then Venezuela is another example in his foreign policy where if all we get is, you know, kind of the majority of regime limping along, then not to me is a failure when they had an election, we know that the party of Maria Machado prevailed

and that should be the model to have another election and to try to get the rest of the thugs out of there. - Yeah. - But then he's trying to go for a model that avoids the pitfalls of the regime change,

full on wars of George H.W. Bush. So he doesn't want to deal with an insurgency comprised of the remnants of the regime loyalists. You know, either Venezuela or Iran, I understand that, so I'm open to that,

but if you don't get the transition to something better and you don't get the end, the end state of Iran doesn't have to be a perfect democracy, doesn't have to be Denmark, but it can, if it was something better where you gave the people a chance

and you'll know by the way, people will vote with their feet,

“I think a lot of Iranians would return to their home country,”

you know, if they thought it was safe. So he's got to do that and there are other questions which is let's leave aside the bombing. Why didn't the United States figure out a way to try to either turn the internet back on,

have a plan and place to try to give Iranians a chance to defeat or figure out ways through Starlink or other satellite to get around that era that blackout. And then in turn, take away the internet and take away the command and control

for the regime as they were doing the crackdown. That United States has those capabilities. Why were they not going to go at that time is something that I'm certainly trying to find out journalistically, but I think that that's a huge question.

And there should be a kind of plan in place assuming there will be a next time and that we should have a kind of protocol. The next time Iranians are kind of in the street and mass here is what we're going to do

to try to advantage them. And right now, it's not just Trump because we didn't have that for other uprisings under Biden and other in Obama, et cetera, but there really needs to be something like that in place

because I think the Iranian people are just not going to let this go.

And finally, like back to Trump sometimes creates

his own problems. His kind of insane talk about Greenland and by the way, I would support buying Greenland like in an normal way, but leaving what would have been going to invade Denmark.

It's in insane proposition. But that alienating of Europe in that way, we could really use effective diplomacy with Europe to kick out Iranian ambassadors,

live in Europe and America and Canada,

and try to use that as a leverage point to try to get defections at the elite levels of the regime. These are things that I hope we're doing, but I think it's made it much harder to do given the Trump theatrics on other things,

like terror, Greenland, et cetera. Yeah. It sounds like-- and I mean, this is kind of the case

“of covering foreign policy and that's why it's so great.”

You've done it for so many decades. Is that we won't know exactly how to evaluate Trump's record until some time is passed and to see the proof in the pudding. Right. And then--

Although I do think that I think getting-- I think he did set back the Iranian nuclear program considerably. And that was an unemployed kind of foreign policy victory. And through that, he deserves a lot of credit. He deserves a lot of credit for arranging a deal

whereby Israeli hostages were returned, allowing for Israel kind of end the war. I don't think they could have ended it unless they got their hostages living hostage back. So that to me is those are real accomplishments.

And we shouldn't diminish them. But I also think that on the other hand, Trump does other things that make his path to greatness, if he will, harder. And then we haven't even talked about the domestic stuff,

but we've seen in this whole period, it looks like they've backed away from their policy of sending poorly trained border patrol agents and ICE officers into cities where they were not wanted to try to round up illegal immigrants.

Now, it looks like that's no longer going to be the policy after the horrible tragedies of the shooting of Alex Pretty and Renee Good. But the way that his administration handled it was atrocious, and they should be shamed for that,

calling them domestic terrorists when there wasn't evidence of that kind of thing.

So it's a mixed bag with Trump as always.

And even though that's a domestic story, it is hard to make the case that you're supporting a democratic transition in Iran when the president uses about nationalizing the mental elections.

- These things are in tension, if you will. - Yes, and we should say that when you were talking about the hostages there, something that is maybe obvious, but I think about a lot is that Iran we're not intervening just simply for the good of our heart

that we think the people want assistance in over throwing your regime. Of course, Iran has funded so much terrorism globally that there are strategic interests in why America benefits. - Yes, I like that.

- It's over terming. - Yeah, now you're getting at a great point here, which is that there's something known as R2P, the responsibility to protect. I don't really think that that is a doctrine works

'cause there's gonna be horrible tragedies in the world in America can't do anything about. But this is one where there was a terrible humanitarian catastrophe that happens to overlap with a regime that is the source of so much mayhem and mischief

in the Middle East and has been in a valid American foe. So, again, this is an example where this is over terming. I wouldn't wanna say that in all cases when there are humanitarian disasters and America will intervene,

“that I think is, I don't think that's a realistic thing,”

I mean, nice, but in this particular case, again, it's over terming. And the real problem is that, just a sort of a final thing and I wrote this last week, but the reason why we haven't, I think the real reason why we haven't done this

is that we are kind of realizing now that Iran can has more ballistic missiles than we have the interceptors to shoot them out of the sky.

So we developed an amazing technology of missile defense,

which many people thought was impossible. But in fact, the realities we did come up with this technology, but what we didn't think about was that it caused us far more to build the interceptors to shoot them down than for the bad guys to come up with the missiles.

So, that was another thing, after the 12 day war, we had a huge kind of backlog. We, the cupboard was bare for the most part and the assistance that we're providing to Ukraine. So we need to also figure out how to make more

of these interceptors in a deal with our supply chain. That's a separate question, but it's one

“that I think has been avoided by Congress.”

Defense Secretary is in presidents for the last 25 years. Everybody has said, missile defense and missiles. This is the future of warfare. I've been reading that in national defense strategies now for 25 years.

So, that's where we're at. Yeah. Well, I think we'll leave things there,

we'll be coming back with more episodes like this

“when appropriate and look out for our new series.”

It's coming soon. Okay, thank you. Thank you.

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