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Folks, you've been lied to. You've been hearing for weeks now from all of the doubters, all of the so called panicans. But here is what you are not going to hear anywhere else. Not just that President Trump is winning in Iran, but why he is winning. He came in with four goals. He has now achieved three of them and the fourth is on the way. Iran had three methods of resistance. President Trump has basically eliminated two of them and the. And the third is on the way. I'll explain it all. This is the Ben Shapiro Show. Now, folks, we keep hearing that President Trump didn't actually lay out the goals of the war in Iran. And people keep assuming that the goal of the war in Iran was regime change. No, regime change is a means. It is not the actual end. In a certain sense. If the regime were to change its behavior dramatically, you wouldn't need to change the regime. And yes, if there were to be regime change, it would achieve pretty much all the goals all at once. But you don't have to achieve all of the goals of the war with regime change. So he did lay out the goals and so did his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. And here they were. One, destroying the vast majority of Iran's forward military capacity. Done. We have defenestrated their forward military capacity. Their missile base, basically gone. Their air force, their navy, gone. Two, wiping out their defense industrial base. Done. The United States and Israel have wiped out their steel foundries. They have hit all of their missile factories. They have hit their missile launchers. Three, keeping their economy in a stranglehold, depriving them of the means to rebuild, obviously. Done. The Iranian economy is defunct. Nothing has been getting in. And finally, four, ending the Iranian nuclear threat. And that's the one that's pending. So three of those four have basically been done. It's the Iranian nuclear threat that is the one that's left on the table. Okay, say the Panicans and the Liars. But somehow Iran has gotten stronger. This is what we might call the Obi Wan Kenobi theory of foreign policy. If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine. Okay? It doesn't work that way. In real life, when you strike someone down, they usually stay down. And if they recover, you can strike them down again. The spirit of Iran is not going to teach Luke Skywalker how to blow up the Death Star. That's not how this works. It is not clear how you get stronger by being alienated from every single country in the region, from Jews to Muslims or how Somehow you're getting stronger if all your leaders are dead and you're walking around as a regime pretending that an impotent comatose dude with no leg is your actual leader. Weekend at mullahs. Or how you get stronger when your missile launch capacity has been so degraded, so radically degraded that you're being forced to physically unbury the missile launchers you buried. They buried a bunch of missile launchers to hide them and now you're being forced to unbury them just so you have something to shoot. And we can see you doing that. And so if there's another round here, we will just blow those up too. Or how you get stronger if your navy is at the bottom of the sea. Or how you get stronger if your air force, which was a bunch of Vietnam era crap, is now a bunch of shrapnel. How you're stronger when your economy is totally nonexistent, when in a few weeks you're not going to have money to pay your IRGC thugs. But okay, fine, say the Panicans and the liars. The Iranians will still win. They will win by outlasting. So here's the thing. Staying alive isn't winning unless we're doing the Hunger Games, which we're not. So just to take a similar example, is Cuba winning right now? Is Cuba winning? Cuba, the Cuban communist regime has survived. Are they winning or are they on their last legs? Pretty clear they are losing. And so is the regime in Tehran. So the regime in Tehran had three methods of resistance and they've been building all three of these methods of resistance for years and years and years and years. First, the so called axis of resistance. This would be all of the terror proxies they put all over the region, from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis to terror groups in Iraq, right? All of those members of the Axis of Resistance were supposed to be Iran's forward army. That was their forward capacity. And since October 7, 2023, Israel has steadily degraded and or destroyed the those terrorists for forward capacity. So Hamas, for example, no forward capacity at this point. They're stuck in a small section of Gaza they may be trying to rebuild. Won't matter. Israel will go in and blow them up again. Hezbollah has been so greatly reduced as a power in the region, as we'll talk about that now, they are in danger of complete evisceration. The Houthis could have gone active anytime during this war, after all their Iranian allies. And they didn't. And they didn't for a reason. They knew that if they had they would have been obliterated too. So, so the terror proxies that Iran had been funding for generations basically defenestrated. That was their number one mode of striking back. Number two was the nuclear program. Okay, so the nuclear program, that was what they were attempting to develop. They're racing toward a nuclear bomb to protect their regime, and that is what caused all of this to happen. If they'd given up their nuclear program years ago, they would have had normalized relations with a lot of different countries. The sanctions would not be on them. But they decided that they were going to race forward with that nuclear program, and they got the hell bombed out of them. And then finally there was the Strait of Hormuz. Okay, so the Strait of Hormuz, they shut that down, right? And them shutting down the Strait of Hormuz was supposed to be their trump card. That was the thing that was supposed to stop everything. And this is where all of the panic ins and all the liars and the people who hate Trump and hate Israel and all the rest, this is where all of them started. Well, you know, you know, the Iranians, they really showed you. They shut the Strait of Hormuz. They shut the Strait of Hormuz. Well, it's open now. In just a moment, we'll get to President Trump's announcement that the Strait of Hormuz is in fact open. First, you spend roughly a third of your life sleeping. That's not just a fun fact. That is a massive chunk of your existence where your body is either recovering or falling apart. If you're sleeping on a saggy generic mattress, you're not setting yourself up for success. Helix actually builds mattresses for you. You take a quick sleep quiz online. 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Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. Helixleep.com Ben so as of this morning, the President of the United States put out a statement, quote, the Strait of Hormuz is completely open and ready for business and full passage. But the naval blockade will remain in full force and effect as it pertains to Iran only until such time as our transaction with Iran is 100% complete. This process should go very quickly and that most of the points are already negotiated. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President Trump okay, so it's open now. So remember that time when they said that we would never be able to open the strait. We would never be able to. So what did we do? We said, you guys can close the strait, but if you do, we are going to stop all ships going in and out of Iranian ports and then you just won't have an economy and then you are dead in the water. And guess what? Guess what. Within a week and a half they opened the the strait. They stopped messing around in the strait because they didn't have the forward operating capacity. Their navy was in fact at the bottom of the sea. The Persian Gulf was littered with the hulks of their ships. The reality is that their pathetic mine laying capacities, and I say pathetic because they were actually just putting mines in the water and losing them out there. We are now demining the Strait of Hormuz because they weren't even competent enough to do that. The President put out some more truth socials on this subject. Quote, now that the Hormuz Strait situation is over, I received a call from NATO asking if we would need some help. I told them to stay away unless they just want to load up their ships with oil. They were useless when needed. A paper tiger. President Trump fact. And then he said Iran, with the help of the United States has removed or is removing all sea mines. Thank you again. This deal is not tied in any way to Lebanon, but we will make Lebanon great again. I'll explain why that one is important in just a second. And the President said Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again. It will no longer be used as a weapon against the world. President Trump and of course the reason this happened really is because the Chinese said we're not doing this game. That's really what happened here is that the Strait of Hormuz closing hurt the Chinese way worse than it hurt us. The Chinese presumably brought pressure to bear via Pakistan on the Iranians and the Iranians decided to open the strait. So that is a victory. Now, there are people saying, well, it wouldn't have been shut in the first place if you hadn't attacked Iran. Okay? But the point is, the reason that Iran did that is because they were desperate. Again, there were only three things that they could do to preserve their regime long term. One, was the axis of resistance been defenestrated, been destroyed. This is why what Trump said about Lebanon and the Lebanon war is important. Two, nuclear program defended, by the way, by a shield of ballistic missiles. One of the reasons why the United States and Israel went now is because Iran was ramping up its development of ballistic missiles beyond the capacity of various Thaad systems and Patriot systems to shoot them down. And so Israel and the United States said, you don't get to build an umbrella of missiles and then build your nukes beneath them. And so that's what prompted all of this. So that was their other capacity. We'll get to the nukes in a second. Then third was the straight of Hormuz and two of the three capacities have now been removed and the third is well on its way. So, yes, that's a victory. Again, look at the shifting goal post. A week ago people were saying, he'll never be able to open this. Literally one week ago, he'll never be able to open the Strait of Hormuz. It won't happen. The Iranians just have a stranglehold. They have total control. Weird, because like 10 days later it's open. And by the way, the only ships that are not free to transit the Strait are the ones that we are locking up. Why? I don't know how that doesn't sound like a victory to you. It is a victory, in fact, when oil dives back down dramatically and we've been told that that was the chief element that was somehow going to undermine the war. When Brent crude dropped 11% at the beginning of the morning, down below 90 bucks, and it's going to drop further when that. How is that not a victory, by the way? And one of the reasons, by the way, that Iran had to give up the Ghost Year is because of all of the airstrikes that we did in Iran. Miyad Maleki points out from the foundation of Defense for Democracies, that the six plus weeks of strikes before the blockade actually made it far more devastating for the regime. Seventy percent of their missile launchers had been destroyed or disabled. Two hundred air defense systems were struck. The US and Israel had achieved full air superiority within 24 hours. Missile launches plummeted from three hundred and fifty on day one to fifty by day four. And most importantly, Iran could not reroute its oil over land, which meant that they were done if they couldn't export their oil by building pipelines in other ways. Right. When the Strait of Hormuz shut, Saudi immediately started building pipelines in other directions. Iran could not because we had struck their capacity to do so. Their two biggest steel plants shut down. That meant 70% of their steel capacity disrupted. 85% of their petrochemical export capacity was knocked out. The South Par strikes alone took out 12% of Iran's total gas production. Okay, so what does this mean? Well, it means again, go back to those things that Iran supposedly was holding over the United States and Israel and all of our Gulf allies. It's terror proxies, ballistic missile and nukes. And the strait. Well, the strait is now open. The ballistic missiles have been devastated. The nukes are on their way, as we'll get to in a moment. And so all that was left was basically the terror proxies and the terror proxies had been largely destroyed. The reason why the United States and Israel had the unique capacity to go after Iran right now is because Israel spent the last couple of years destroying Hezbollah. The great threat in 2022, if you asked any Israeli, was from the northern border, Hezbollah, possibility of them shooting targeted rockets by the tens of thousands into Israel. And Israel ended that threat and then moved forward to completely end the threat in the middle of this war so that Iran had no forward capacity. So Iran is trying to save face now. Iran is trying to claim that it's not because the President of the United States put a blockade on Iranian ships that they are giving up control of the Strait of Hormuz. They're lying. They're saying that the, the only reason for the ceasefire is, is the ceasefire in Lebanon. So simultaneous with this happening, the President of the United States pushed forward a ceasefire in Lebanon. So while all eyes have been on the situation in Iran, Israel has been doing heavy operations in the south of Lebanon to finally, once and for all extirpate the threat from the south of Lebanon. For those who don't know their history, Hezbollah has been a dominant force in southern Lebanon since the early 80s. So if you look back at Lebanese history, it's amazing. There's so many people who hate Israel and who are purportedly doing so because in some way they supposedly love Christians. Which again, I find a bizarre contention, since literally the only country with a naturally growing Christian population in the entire Middle east is Israel. But if you want to look at who kills Christians, take a look at Lebanon. Take a look at Lebanon. Lebanon used to be a thriving Christian country. It was, in fact, a majority Christian country. And then it became more and more Muslim. And then even beyond that, it turned into a Palestinian chaotic hellhole. The reality is that the Palestinians arrived in Lebanon in the mid-70s after they were expelled from Jordan. They took up residence at the southern border and they started murdering Lebanese politicians, Christian politicians, and they started attacking across the border into Israel. That is what led to, for example, Israel's incursions into Lebanon in both 1978 and 1982. And the Israelis were told not to do that in 1982. By the way, a great tragedy, because if Israel had been able to finish off the PLO in 1982, it would have forestalled the collapse of the Lebanese government, ending in a bizarre power sharing arrangement in Lebanon in 1989 that eventually led to essentially the domination of the entire government of Lebanon by the Iranian terrorist group Hezbollah. So that's the actual backstory here. So the President announced that the Lebanese government, which since Israel has been attacking Hezbollah over the course of the last couple of years in retaliation, by the way, for Hezbollah joining in a couple of days late on the October 7 attacks, because Israel did such damage to Hezbollah. The Lebanese government, which has always had a very, very raw and difficult relationship with Hezbollah, which is both a terrorist group and also they have a political presence in the government of Lebanon. The Lebanese government has never truly wanted to be run by an outside terrorist group, run from Iran, which is what Hezbollah is. And so there are now talks, open talks between the Lebanese government, which says they oppose Hezbollah, and the Israeli government. Now, the big problem in Lebanon is that Hezbollah has a lot of weapons. The Lebanese government and the Lebanese army have been particularly weak. You'll remember there was a quasi settlement that was signed between the Lebanese government and the Israelis about a year ago. And the goal of that agreement was to allow the Lebanese government to strip Hezbollah of its capacity against Israel. And that would lead to some sort of peace agreement. And Lebanon was un achieve that Hezbollah was rebuilding below the Latanya River. The Latonya river is a river that runs east west in Lebanon, located about 1/4 of the way from the southern border of Lebanon. Okay, so the. So in the last couple of weeks, Israel did a massive operation in Lebanon. They took out something like 1700 Hezbollah fighters. They cleared the Hezbollah population from southern Lebanon. They moved all the way up to the Latanya river and they blew up the bridges and then they moved north of the Latanya river. Also, because the idea is never again will Israel allow Hezbollah to routinely fire rockets by the thousands into northern Israel. There were hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens who for legitimately two years were living away from their homes at kind of apartments other places in Israel. The entire north of Israel was emptied because of Hezbollah's rocket fire. And so Israel said, we're not doing that anymore. And while we are taking out the Iranian forward capacity, we are going to take out their true forward capacity in Hezbollah. And Hezbollah panicked and Hezbollah freaked out and they called on the Iranian government to help them. And the Iranian government couldn't do much. And so what the Iranian government is now trying to claim is that the only reason why they are opening the Strait of Hormuz is because they somehow pride a concession out of President Trump and Israel with regard to saving Hezbollah. That is the, that is the thing that they are promoting. Now. President Trump immediately put out a statement and he said that that is not actually what is happening here. He said that this had nothing to do, the opening of the Strait of Hormuz had nothing to do with Lebanon. Quote. Again, this deal is not tied in any way to Lebanon, but we will make Lebanon great again. So what is exactly happening there? Well, the President announced, quote, I just had excellent conversations with a highly respected President Joseph Ayoun of Lebanon and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel. These two leaders have agreed that in order to achieve peace between their countries, they will formally begin a 10 day ceasefire at 5pm Eastern on Tuesday. The two countries met for the first time in 34 years here in Washington D.C. with our great Secretary of State Marco Rubio. I've directed Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Rubio together with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan, Raising Cain to work with Israel and Lebanon to achieve a lasting peace. It has been my honor to solve nine wars across the world. This will be my 10th. So let's get it done. President Trump now notice who else is sitting there. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Nancaine. Why? Because presumably any negotiation will have to have some guarantee that the Lebanese government will actually take action against the Iranian forward proxy Hezbollah. And if they don't have the capacity, presumably Dan Cain, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is going to help out Lebanon in fulfilling its commitments. Cuz otherwise there ain't gonna be a lasting deal here and the President knows it. Prime Minister Netanyahu put out a statement, quote, this opportunity for peace exists because since the War of Redemption, we have fundamentally changed the balance of power in Lebanon. We activated the pagers, we eliminated the massive arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles that Hassan Nasrallah prepared to destroy Israel cities. We eliminated Nasrallah. This balance has shifted to such an extent that over the past month we began receiving calls from Lebanon to hold direct peace talks between us. This is something that hasn't happened in over 40 years. I answered that call, I agreed to a timeout, or more accurately a temporary 10 day ceasefire. But to try and advance the agreement we began discussing during the meeting of ambassadors in Washington. There are two demands that Netanyahu is making for the peace talks. The first is the disarmament of Hezbollah. The second is a sustainable peace agreement, peace through strength. So in other words, Israel is not going to simply sign away its security at its own northern border because Iran is asking it to. Hezbollah wanted two conditions. First, that Israel withdraw from all Lebanese territory back to the international border. And second, a ceasefire based on the quiet for quiet model, meaning if you don't fire, we don't fire. And Netanyahu said, I agree to neither of these. And indeed these two conditions are not being met. We're remaining in Lebanon in a reinforced security buffer zone. This is not the five points that existed before Operation Roaring Lion. This is a security buffer that starts at the sea and continues to Mount Dove and the foothills of Mount Hermon up to the Syrian border. This is a security 10 km deep, which is much stronger, more intense, more continuous and more solid than what we had previously. That is where we are and we are not leaving. This allows us first and foremost to block the danger of an invasion into our communities. And secondly, it allows us to prevent direct anti tank fire into our communities. The residents are now protected from these two dangers. Of course there are still problems, says Netanyahu. They still have rockets left. We will have to deal with that as well as part of the progress toward a security agreement and a continuous peace treaty. But there's something else, and I want to tell you what it is. I've spoken with President Trump over these last two days, says Netanyahu, and he told me he's tremendously determined to continue the the naval blockade and to bring about the dismantling of Iran's nuclear capability. What remains of it. He is not Giving up on this. He is certain he can eliminate this threat once and for all, continuing the great things we have done together. Of course, we will also handle the missile threat and the enrichment capability. I will not elaborate. These are two very important moves that can fundamentally change our security and diplomatic situation for years to come. With God's help, we will act. And with God's help, we will succeed. While President Trump was asked what is different this time with regard to Israel and and Lebanese negotiations, he says the answer is that I'm here. Israel and Lebanon have tried to make peace before. What's going to be the difference this time?