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Welcome. This program is called Next up with Mark Halperin. And by happenstance, I am Mark Halperin, host of your program here, editor in chief of the live Interactive video platform 2way and your guide to everything. Next up, in the midst of another wartime episode. Grateful to you for joining. You'll be happy. You did have great, two great guests and my reported monologue on the information wars and how little we actually know about what's going on in Iran itself and then also in the region and all the areas of the war we care about. After that, we're going to talk to someone who spent the first 17 years of his life in Iran. Ali Nasser is now professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins and a former State Department official. He's going to have interesting things to tell us about. The central question for me, which is what is going on with the Iranian people and the Iranian government and what is the relationship between between those two things? Lastly, fan favorite Mark Short is here, former chief of staff to Mike Pence. He and I are going to kick around the politics of the war, the midterms and one of our Favorite topics here, 2028. Excited to talk to them both. But before that, I'm going to get into my reported monologue and tell you what I've been finding, as I call around the country and the world about trying to understand this war. That is next up. So quick question for anyone with a dog or a cat. Have you ever bought a flea treatment, used it exactly like the instructions said and the fleas just didn't care? You're not imagining it. Fleas actually build resistance to over the counter treatments over time. Frontline advantage Seresto they work for a while and then they just stop. And meanwhile you spend $150, $200 maybe more and your dog is still scratching. Here's what most people don't know. The stuff your vet prescribes. Bravetco, Simparica, Nexgard. It hits differently. 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And you've got, you got what's going on in the, in the Strait of Hormuz, what's going on with potential new peace talks, what's going on in the White House, what's going on in Asia and Europe. I talked to a lot of people in the government, in our government, other governments. I talked to military and retired military. I talked to business leaders about how the markets are reacting and might react. I've never felt more unclear about where things are. And my focus continues to be on all those things, but most of all on what's going on in Iran. When you think about geopolitics as it connects to politics, trying to understand what would cause the war to end. And the Trump administration has pursued a policy that involves putting pressure on Iran, first militarily, but also economically, now with President Trump's blockade, to basically try to assume it's based on an assumption. It's based on a premise, right? That if the Iranian government feels under pressure that they're going to be killed, that their infrastructure is going to be destroyed, that the economy is going to be laid down even more lower, that they'll give in and maybe not give in 100%, but that they'll come to the negotiating table the next time and they'll make more serious concessions. And the president's been pretty hard line saying, I need 100% concessions on these particular things in exchange for allowing Iran to be in the community of nations. That premise that the Iranian leadership that's currently in there will act as rational actors, I hear it all the time from people in the United States and president supporters in Congress as team. That's the premise is grind them down, make them cry uncle because of the conduct of the war. And that may eventually happen. But what we've seen so far is the Iranian government has its spine stiffened and has found, as we've talked about from the beginning of the war, the way to leverage their asymmetrical advantages. They can't compete with the United States blow for blow, but they can close the strait. They can inflict some damage on targets in the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia and Israel enough to intimidate, enough to demonstrate that they're not giving up. And whether it's radical Extremism or unrealistic sense of things or rational strategy and tactics. They haven't given up yet. Now there may be more negotiations in which they will. When people look at the American government, most open society in the world, open media, open public polling. My colleagues will sometimes these days say the war is really unpopular. President Trump's support has cratered. His coalition has splintered apart. Really not supported by the data. Certainly the war is not popular and it's become less so. But MAGA still supports the president. Republicans in general still support the president. And yet there's all these assertions. Well, the President posted a picture of himself as Jesus. You put that up F1 for the four of you haven't seen it yet. And he's fighting with the Pope. And between this picture and the fighting with the Pope, the President's permanently alienating Christians and particularly Catholics. No, maybe, but there's no evidence of that. But it's very hard to track. And we live in a time now with all this digital media, the traditional media. Now back in the early part of my career, if you wanted to know what was going on, how was a president's policies affecting public opinion, how is the controversy going? At 6:30 Eastern Time, you turn on the 3 Network News evening broadcasts and you'd read the Associated Press and you'd say, okay, I get a sense. And you'd look at a poll and you'd say, okay, I get a sense we don't live in that world anymore. And even, even trying to understand American opinion, American attitudes towards any story, but again, focused on the Iran war, it's not easy to do. And I am privileged if you're interested in that, if you're interested in being really right on the moment to moment, I'm privileged in what I do for a living and the access I have to information, not just the information you have access to, but the information that I get from my sources. And I got really no strong sense of what's going on in this country, how engaged people are in the war, what troubles them about it, what doesn't. Now there's a select group of people, people interested in the news, people come on two way, who I get to talk to twice a day. They've got concerns, whether they're Democrats or super maga, they've definitely got concerns. But this notion of understanding what's going on in Iran is really tough. And the notion of what's going on in China, this country, as much as people are upset about concerned about China in the context of the war and in general, from the media to ordinary people, we just don't have clued into China. Ever since the President announced the blockade, I've been wondering, what is China going to do? China doesn't want a blockade by the United States. China doesn't want to be unable to get things, including oil, from Iran. Other countries cover this more. Here's a couple of video clips we found from newscasts these days. One from Singapore, one from the United Kingdom. This is how other countries are talking about the conflict and China's role. S1, please. There was a call for calm and restraint and it signals China's position on the situation, that it wants to be seen as a responsible global actor and that it prioritizes stability over confrontation.
